I was running three cloud sync apps at once. Google Drive was chewing 400 MB of RAM in the background, OneDrive had pinned its own notification icon next to the clock, and Dropbox kept asking me to log back in every time the laptop woke up. None of them talked to each other, none of them handled conflicts the same way, and every time I wanted to move a file between providers I was playing three remote controls for one TV. I uninstalled all three and built one folder instead. Rclone made that possible in an afternoon, and the trick is that it does not sync anything unless I tell it to.
What rclone is, and what it is not
Rclone is a free, open source command line tool (a program you run by typing instructions into a terminal) that speaks the storage APIs of more than seventy providers. Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, Box, pCloud, S3, Backblaze B2, WebDAV, SFTP, and a long tail of others. You run a one time setup, give it permission to your account, and it can copy, sync, mount, or serve those files over HTTP, SFTP, or WebDAV. That last bit, mounting, is what makes it feel like a local folder instead of another sync app.
When you mount a cloud provider as a local folder, the files do not get downloaded to your hard drive. They appear when you open them, like streaming, and the bytes stay on the provider’s servers until you actually need them. A traditional sync client copies everything you touch onto your disk over time, and that is the part that gets out of hand when you have a 200 GB Drive and a 150 GB Dropbox. Rclone lets you browse the whole thing without owning any of it locally.
- Works with 70+ providers, not just the big three
- One time auth per provider, then rclone remembers it
- Can copy, sync, mount, or serve files over HTTP, SFTP, and WebDAV
- Runs on Windows, macOS, Linux, and a Raspberry Pi if you really want to
The thing rclone is not is a friendly GUI. The default experience is a terminal and a config file. There is a paid product called RcloneBrowser that adds a GUI on top, and a community fork called RcloneUI that does the same thing for free. You can also wrap it in scripts so the commands feel less intimidating. The tool itself is small; the muscle is learning the verbs (verbs are the commands you type, like copy, sync, mount, ls).
Why three sync clients is a real problem
The cost of running three sync apps is not the storage. It is the resource drain and the cognitive overhead (the constant mental tax of remembering which app owns which folder). Every client runs its own watcher process (a background program that notices when files change), holds open a notification channel, and decides for itself what a “conflict” means when you edit the same file in two places. Google Drive creates filename (Conflict from PC on 2026-08-08).txt files. OneDrive appends your laptop name and a timestamp. Dropbox asks you which one wins. None of them agree, and the disagreement is your problem.
Then there is the local disk. Each sync client downloads everything you have touched over the past month or so. Add up three providers and your laptop has three copies of files you probably did not need locally. SSD space disappears, backup windows blow out, and indexing services like Spotlight or Windows Search get slow because there is so much more to crawl.
- RAM: three idle sync clients hold 200 to 600 MB between them
- Disk: downloaded-but-not-needed files eat 5 to 20 GB per provider
- Notifications: three tray icons, three update prompts, three “your storage is full” nags
- Conflict resolution: three different behaviors when you edit offline
The setup, in three commands
The rclone install is a single binary on every platform. On macOS it is brew install rclone. On Linux it is a one line script from the rclone download page. On Windows you download a .zip and add the folder to your PATH (the PATH is the list of folders your terminal searches when you type a command). After that, you authenticate each provider once.
rclone config
That command opens an interactive prompt. You pick n for a new remote, name it something memorable (gdrive, onedrive, dropbox), pick the provider from a numbered list, and rclone opens a browser window to grant it access. You repeat that for each provider you want to mount. The credentials are stored in an encrypted file at ~/.config/rclone/rclone.conf, and the config is portable across machines, so you can copy it to a new laptop and skip the browser dance.
Once you have a remote configured, mounting it is one command per provider:
rclone mount gdrive: ~/Cloud/gdrive --vfs-cache-mode minimal
That line mounts your entire Google Drive at ~/Cloud/gdrive and uses minimal caching (caching means keeping a temporary local copy of files you have recently opened). The --vfs-cache-mode flag controls how aggressively rclone holds onto recently opened files; minimal is fine for browsing, full is faster if you are editing big media files in place.
The daily use, day six
I have been running this for six months and the daily pattern is short. I open Finder, navigate to ~/Cloud/, and the four mounted providers are sitting there like four USB drives. I drag a file from the Google Drive folder into the OneDrive folder to copy it across providers. I open a Photoshop .psd from Dropbox, edit it, and hit save; rclone streams the change back without me doing anything. I do not have a sync client running. I do not have a tray icon. The RAM I used to give to three sync apps is back, and my SSD has roughly 40 GB more free space because I stopped caching three providers’ worth of files locally.
The mount survives sleep and wake. It survives reboots if you wrap the mount command in a LaunchAgent (macOS) or a systemd unit (Linux, where systemd is the background service manager that starts things on boot). On Windows you use the Task Scheduler. None of these are difficult, and once you have set them up you stop thinking about them.
- Finder / Explorer: just a folder, nothing to launch
- File operations: drag, drop, save, rename, all native
- Offline edits: rclone queues writes, syncs when the network returns
- Cross provider copy: drag from one mounted folder to another
Trade-offs
The honest list of things rclone does not solve:
- First read latency. The first time you open a file from a mounted provider, it has to round trip to the cloud. On a fast connection that is invisible. On a slow hotel Wi-Fi, it is noticeable, and you wait a few seconds for a big file.
- No selective sync UI. Traditional sync clients let you tick checkboxes for which folders to mirror. Rclone has the same feature, but it is config-driven, not a checkbox. You can do it; it is just less pretty.
- No real time collaboration. Google Drive and OneDrive both have live co-editing. Rclone only sees files; it does not know about Drive’s app layer. If you depend on co-editing Docs and Sheets, you still need a browser.
- Token rotation. Every year or so, Google and Microsoft expire your grant and ask you to log in again. Rclone surfaces this clearly, but you have to reauth, which is a five minute interruption.
What I would tell past me
If I were talking to the version of me that installed Google Drive, OneDrive, and Dropbox in the same week, I would say: pick one provider for daily work, mount the other two as read-only (rclone supports this with the --read-only flag), and stop letting three clients fight over the same ~/Documents. The savings on RAM, disk, and notification noise will pay back the half day of setup within a week, and the daily workflow gets simpler instead of weirder. You will not miss the tray icons.