rclone
rclone is an outstanding cloud-storage CLI: incremental sync, cross-provider transfer, mount-as-filesystem, encryption, and more. Use it against Filebase by configuring an S3-compatible remote.
Install
| Platform | Command |
|---|---|
| macOS | brew install rclone |
| Linux | curl https://rclone.org/install.sh | sudo bash |
| Windows | Download installer |
Configure a Filebase remote
Run rclone config and pick the following:
n) New remote
name> filebase
Storage> 4 (Amazon S3 Compliant Storage Providers)
provider> 32 (Other)
env_auth> 1 (Enter AWS credentials)
access_key_id> <your access key>
secret_access_key> <your secret key>
region> auto
endpoint> https://s3.filebase.io
location_constraint> (leave blank)
acl> private
Or write the config directly to ~/.config/rclone/rclone.conf:
[filebase]
type = s3
provider = Other
env_auth = false
access_key_id = YOUR_FILEBASE_KEY
secret_access_key = YOUR_FILEBASE_SECRET
region = auto
endpoint = https://s3.filebase.io
acl = private
Common operations
# List buckets
rclone lsd filebase:
# List objects in a bucket (recursive)
rclone ls filebase:my-bucket
# Copy file → Filebase
rclone copy ./photo.jpg filebase:my-bucket/
# Copy directory → Filebase (incremental sync)
rclone copy ./local-folder/ filebase:my-bucket/uploads/
# Download a directory
rclone copy filebase:my-bucket/uploads/ ./downloads/
# Sync (delete files in destination that don't exist in source — be careful)
rclone sync ./local-folder/ filebase:my-bucket/folder/
# Move (copy then delete source)
rclone move ./local-folder/ filebase:my-bucket/uploads/
Bandwidth limiting
Useful when running over a constrained connection:
rclone copy --bwlimit 10M ./big-folder/ filebase:my-bucket/
Parallelism
rclone copy --transfers 16 --checkers 32 ./big-folder/ filebase:my-bucket/
--transfers is the number of files copied in parallel; --checkers is the number of parallel HEAD requests during incremental sync.
Mount as a filesystem
mkdir -p ~/filebase
rclone mount filebase:my-bucket ~/filebase --vfs-cache-mode writes
Now ~/filebase is a regular directory that reads and writes through to the bucket. Useful for legacy applications that expect a local filesystem.
Cross-provider migration
rclone is excellent for moving data between providers:
# Configure both remotes (rclone config), then:
rclone copy aws-s3:my-bucket filebase:my-bucket --transfers 8
This streams objects from AWS S3 directly into Filebase without writing to local disk.
Verify after copy
rclone check ./local-folder/ filebase:my-bucket/folder/
check compares hashes and reports any mismatches.
What's next
- AWS CLI — alternative CLI
- Backup recipes
- Migrating from AWS S3