The Core Verbs

Scope: copy, sync, move, and their close relatives — what each one does to the destination, and the one naming rule that bites every beginner exactly once.

copy — add what's missing, change what's stale

$ rclone copy fixture-src local1:store/documents -v
INFO  : photos/cat.jpg: Copied (new)
INFO  : archive/old-note.txt: Copied (new)
...
Transferred:       2.500 MiB / 2.500 MiB, 100%
Transferred:            9 / 9, 100%

copy never deletes. Run it again immediately and it does the other half of its job — recognising there's nothing to do:

INFO  : There was nothing to transfer
Checks:                 9 / 9, 100%

Edit one file and a third run moves that file (whole — see chapter 1) plus anything new, and nothing else. copy is the default verb of this guide and of most real scripts: uploading, archiving, and feeding a destination that is allowed to accumulate.

sync — make the destination match

sync is copy plus a promise: when it finishes, the destination equals the source — including the deletions that requires. That promise is powerful enough to get its own chapter (chapter 6), where you can watch it delete a stray file and a file the source deleted, first in a dry run and then for real. Learn copy first; reach for sync only when "match" is truly what you mean.

move — copy, then remove the source

$ rclone move local1:store/documents/drafts/report.md local1:store/moved -v
INFO  : report.md: Moved (server-side)
Renamed:                1
Server Side Moves:      1 @ 36 B

Two things to notice. The source is gone afterwards — that's the verb's whole point — and where source and destination live on the same storage, rclone says Moved (server-side): no bytes crossed anywhere, the place itself renamed the object. The same trick appears when sync --backup-dir rescues files in chapter 6.

The naming rule: copy fills directories, copyto names files

copy's destination is always a directory to be filled. Hand it a file path as the source and a name you fancy as the destination, and it still treats the destination as a directory. The lab learned this returning a file from the chunker (chapter 11):

$ rclone copy chunked:big-scan.bin big-scan-back.bin
$ ls -l big-scan-back.bin
total 2560
-rw-rw---- 1 root nogroup 2621440 ... big-scan.bin

big-scan-back.bin is a directory containing big-scan.bin. No error, no warning — just not what was asked. The verb that takes a full file name on both ends is copyto (and moveto):

$ rclone copyto chunked:big-scan.bin restored-big-scan.bin
$ cmp fixture-src/photos/big-scan.bin restored-big-scan.bin
[exit 0]

cmp is silent and exits 0: the file that came back is byte-identical. Check: whenever a destination name ends in a file name, ask which verb you're running. Directory in mind → copy. File name in mind → copyto.

The rest of the family, briefly

• delete removes files under a path (it honours filters and --dry-run); purge removes a directory and everything under it:

$ rclone purge local1:store/filtered -v INFO : drafts/report.md: Deleted ... INFO : Local file system at store/filtered: Removing directory

purge asks nothing and confirms nothing. It is the sharpest tool in this chapter; chapter 6's habits apply double.

• cat prints a remote file to your terminal — rclone cat secret:notes/todo.txt is how chapter 10 reads a file straight out of encrypted storage.
• mkdir creates a directory on a remote that needs directories made explicitly (documented) — most backends make them implicitly as files arrive.

Verb	Adds/updates	Deletes at destination	Removes source
copy	yes	never	no
sync	yes	yes — to match	no
move	yes	no	yes
copyto	one file, renamed	replaces that file	no

Scope note: all four main verbs take the same global flags — -v, --dry-run, filters, logging — which is the subject of the next two chapters.