I want to synchronize my files with Amazon Drive. I am using a Linux headless machine and thought about using Rclone for that. I am using rclone sync localdir remote:dir command to sync files local→remote but this is a one time sync.
How can I schedule a periodic (say, once a day) synchronization? Is cron a good way? Or does rclone provide its own mechanism? Will it work when I am not logged to the machine (it's always on)?
The way that I do it is with a cronjob. If it only runs once a day, you shouldn't have a problem with two instances trying to run, but you could always use flock to prevent that just in case:
0 23 * * * flock -n /some/lockfile rclone sync localdir remote:dir
Cron works whenever the machine is on, the user does not have to be logged on. You might, however, want to know/see a log of that task running. You can get the output of cron from:
grep CRON /var/log/syslog
but an easier/more consistent way might be to log the entire activity to a file like so:
0 23 * * * flock -n /some/lockfile rclone sync localdir remote:dir >> /var/log/myjob.log 2>&1
which will log both stderr and stdout in case you ever wanted to check on the job.
