Rclone is a command-line program to manage files on cloud storage. It is a feature-rich alternative to cloud vendors' web storage interfaces. Over 70 cloud storage products support rclone including S3 object stores, business & consumer file storage services, as well as standard transfer protocols. Virtual backends wrap local and cloud file systems to apply encryption, compression, chunking, hashing and joining.
The `chunker` overlay transparently splits large files into smaller chunks during upload to wrapped remote and transparently assembles them back when the file is downloaded. This allows to effectively overcome size limits imposed by storage providers.
A remote of type `crypt` does not access a storage system directly, but instead wraps another remote, which in turn accesses the storage system. This is similar to how alias, union, chunker and a few others work. It makes the usage very flexible, as you can add a layer, in this case an encryption layer, on top of any other backend, even in multiple layers. Rclone's functionality can be used as with any other remote, for example you can mount a crypt remote.
Accessing a storage system through a crypt remote realizes client-side encryption, which makes it safe to keep your data in a location you do not trust will not get compromised. When working against the `crypt` remote, rclone will automatically encrypt (before uploading) and decrypt (after downloading) on your local system as needed on the fly, leaving the data encrypted at rest in the wrapped remote. If you access the storage system using an application other than rclone, or access the wrapped remote directly using rclone, there will not be any encryption/decryption: Downloading existing content will just give you the encrypted (scrambled) format, and anything you upload will _not_ become encrypted.
[FTP](../../internet/FTP.md) is the File Transfer Protocol.
## HTTP
The [HTTP](../../internet/HTTP.md) remote is a read only remote for reading files of a webserver. The webserver should provide file listings which rclone will read and turn into a remote.
## Mega
Mega is a cloud storage and file hosting service known for its security feature where all files are encrypted locally before they are uploaded. This prevents anyone (including employees of Mega) from accessing the files without knowledge of the key used for encryption.
This is an rclone backend for Mega which supports the file transfer features of Mega using the same client side encryption.
## Memory
The memory backend is an in RAM backend. It does not persist its data.
The memory backend behaves like a bucket-based remote (e.g. like s3). Because it has no parameters you can just use it with the `:memory:` remote name.
During the initial setup with `rclone config` you will specify the upstream remotes as a space separated list. The upstream remotes can either be a local paths or other remotes.
The attributes `:ro`, `:nc` and `:nc` can be attached to the end of the remote to tag the remote as **read only**, **no create** or **writeback**, e.g. `remote:directory/subdirectory:ro` or `remote:directory/subdirectory:nc`.
-`:ro` means files will only be read from here and never written
-`:nc` means new files or directories won't be created here
-`:writeback` means files found in different remotes will be written back here.
Subfolders can be used in upstream remotes. Assume a union remote named `backup` with the remotes `mydrive:private/backup`. Invoking `rclone mkdir backup:desktop` is exactly the same as invoking `rclone mkdir mydrive:private/backup/desktop`.
