---
title: "FAQ"
description: "Rclone Frequently Asked Questions"
date: "2015-08-27"
---

Frequently Asked Questions
--------------------------

### Do all cloud storage systems support all rclone commands ###

Yes they do.  All the rclone commands (eg `sync`, `copy` etc) will
work on all the remote storage systems.

### Can I copy the config from one machine to another ###

Sure!  Rclone stores all of its config in a single file.  If you want
to find this file, the simplest way is to run `rclone -h` and look at
the help for the `--config` flag which will tell you where it is.

See the [remote setup docs](/remote_setup/) for more info.

### How do I configure rclone on a remote / headless box with no browser? ###

This has now been documented in its own [remote setup page](/remote_setup/).

### Can rclone sync directly from drive to s3 ###

Rclone can sync between two remote cloud storage systems just fine.

Note that it effectively downloads the file and uploads it again, so
the node running rclone would need to have lots of bandwidth.

The syncs would be incremental (on a file by file basis).

Eg

    rclone sync drive:Folder s3:bucket


### Using rclone from multiple locations at the same time ###

You can use rclone from multiple places at the same time if you choose
different subdirectory for the output, eg

```
Server A> rclone sync /tmp/whatever remote:ServerA
Server B> rclone sync /tmp/whatever remote:ServerB
```

If you sync to the same directory then you should use rclone copy
otherwise the two rclones may delete each others files, eg

```
Server A> rclone copy /tmp/whatever remote:Backup
Server B> rclone copy /tmp/whatever remote:Backup
```

The file names you upload from Server A and Server B should be
different in this case, otherwise some file systems (eg Drive) may
make duplicates.

### Why doesn't rclone support partial transfers / binary diffs like rsync? ###

Rclone stores each file you transfer as a native object on the remote
cloud storage system.  This means that you can see the files you
upload as expected using alternative access methods (eg using the
Google Drive web interface).  There is a 1:1 mapping between files on
your hard disk and objects created in the cloud storage system.

Cloud storage systems (at least none I've come across yet) don't
support partially uploading an object. You can't take an existing
object, and change some bytes in the middle of it.

It would be possible to make a sync system which stored binary diffs
instead of whole objects like rclone does, but that would break the
1:1 mapping of files on your hard disk to objects in the remote cloud
storage system.

All the cloud storage systems support partial downloads of content, so
it would be possible to make partial downloads work.  However to make
this work efficiently this would require storing a significant amount
of metadata, which breaks the desired 1:1 mapping of files to objects.

### Can rclone do bi-directional sync? ###

No, not at present.  rclone only does uni-directional sync from A ->
B. It may do in the future though since it has all the primitives - it
just requires writing the algorithm to do it.

### Can I use rclone with an HTTP proxy? ###

Yes. rclone will use the environment variables `HTTP_PROXY`,
`HTTPS_PROXY` and `NO_PROXY`, similar to cURL and other programs.

`HTTPS_PROXY` takes precedence over `HTTP_PROXY` for https requests.

The environment values may be either a complete URL or a "host[:port]",
in which case the "http" scheme is assumed.

The `NO_PROXY` allows you to disable the proxy for specific hosts.
Hosts must be comma separated, and can contain domains or parts.
For instance "foo.com" also matches "bar.foo.com".

### Rclone gives x509: failed to load system roots and no roots provided error ###

This means that `rclone` can't file the SSL root certificates.  Likely
you are running `rclone` on a NAS with a cut-down Linux OS, or
possibly on Solaris.

Rclone (via the Go runtime) tries to load the root certificates from
these places on Linux.

    "/etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt", // Debian/Ubuntu/Gentoo etc.
    "/etc/pki/tls/certs/ca-bundle.crt",   // Fedora/RHEL
    "/etc/ssl/ca-bundle.pem",             // OpenSUSE
    "/etc/pki/tls/cacert.pem",            // OpenELEC

So doing something like this should fix the problem.  It also sets the
time which is important for SSL to work properly.

```
mkdir -p /etc/ssl/certs/
curl -o /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bagder/ca-bundle/master/ca-bundle.crt
ntpclient -s -h pool.ntp.org
```

Note that you may need to add the `--insecure` option to the `curl` command line if it doesn't work without.

```
curl --insecure -o /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bagder/ca-bundle/master/ca-bundle.crt
```

### Rclone gives Failed to load config file: function not implemented error ###

Likely this means that you are running rclone on Linux version not
supported by the go runtime, ie earlier than version 2.6.23.

See the [system requirements section in the go install
docs](https://golang.org/doc/install) for full details.

### All my uploaded docx/xlsx/pptx files appear as archive/zip ###

This is caused by uploading these files from a Windows computer which
hasn't got the Microsoft Office suite installed.  The easiest way to
fix is to install the Word viewer and the Microsoft Office
Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 and later
versions' file formats
