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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

PlatformCommand
macOSbrew install rclone
Linuxcurl https://rclone.org/install.sh | sudo bash
WindowsDownload 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