2019-11-13 How to backup data on a remote computer

Sequencing data is precious. Intermediate files take a long time and a lot of resources to generate. Local compute clusters don’t (necessarily) back up our data! Luckily, there is a solution to backing up all of this precious data. rclone is a tool to sync files and directories to and from cloud storage. Since UC Davis has unlimited storage on Google Drive, we will demonstrate how to use rclone to back up to this service.

Presentation: https://hackmd.io/@0wHfIv81QFumMW8-6edr2w/S1S6qRKjS#/
Recording: https://youtu.be/0nfJtFdLlmM
Presenter: @luizirber

Question from session: “What is the difference between copy and sync?”

From https://forum.rclone.org/t/copy-or-sync-performance-for-initial-copy/10941/13

From the point of the code, copy and sync are identical, except sync deleted excess files. (…)

From a practical point of view, use copy - sync can delete stuff you didn’t mean to delete

Another interesting thing: UC Davis Box accounts are limited to 15GB/file, so take that into account when backing up large files…

Update: rclone is now available on conda-forge!

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A really nice post with details on how to set up rclone with google drive: https://alexanderlabwhoi.github.io/post/2020-05-30-rclone/