How can I set up a 2-way sync using rclone to transfer the files?

Question

I have multiple computers and a Dropbox account, but I don't want to use Dropbox's proprietary client program.

I have rclone remotes set up though, and they've been working well enough, but I don't like mentally juggling which of my computers have the latest files, and rclone only has 1-way sync available.

I'm looking to set up an automatic 2-way sync between my devices and this cloud storage location using only FOSS tools available through my apt package manager. While rclone is my bread and butter for syncing the files, I this question may be a fundamentally algorithmic problem akin to how TCP builds a reliable transport protocol on top of a fundamentally unreliable one.

The short question is "Is there GNU / Linux compatible FOSS software capable of performing automatic 2-way sync between my devices and a Dropbox remote?". If that doesn't exist, then the question becomes "How can two computers perform 2-way storage synchronization if given a tool that can query file metadata and perform 1-way sync in a chosen direction?".

Answer 1

The author of rclone answered a question about this kind of thing here. Here's his answer copied below.

rclone doesn’t have a bisync solution at the moment.

There are some ideas on implementing it

https://github.com/ncw/rclone/issues/2870
https://github.com/ncw/rclone/issues/118

And even a 3rd party tool or two

https://github.com/ncw/rclone/wiki/Third-Party-Integrations-with-rclone#rclonesync-v2
https://github.com/ncw/rclone/wiki/Third-Party-Integrations-with-rclone#upback

And one that seems the most promising to me is rclonesync V2. It's a python script that can perform bi-directional sync while using rclone remotes to transfer the files.

Answer 2

You could do:

rclone mount YourRemote: /mnt/remote1

and then use:

rsync [flags] /mnt/remote1 /your/local/directory
rsync [flags] /your/local/directory /mnt/remote1

or something like unison.

With the right flags rsync both ways might do it.

See this question.