Accessing 3rd Party Cloud Storage with Rclone

The rclone application is provided for access to 3rd party cloud storage services. It is provided as a convenient method for copying and moving files to/from HEP storage to external services but it is not officially supported. There is no guarantee that it will work with your provider or continue to work in the future if the provider changes their protocols.

It is suggested to use it for copying and moving things like documents, plots and data archives but not for coding or direct data access.

The usual caveats apply about using 3rd party services for University data, see the University policy for Information Security https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/media/livacuk/computingservices/regulations/informationsecuritypolicy.pdf

Running rclone

rclone should be installed by default on all HEP Linux systems. Run with the command
  • rclone
The configuration file is stored for each user under $HOME/.config/rclone/rclone.conf but is normally configured using the command
  • rclone config

Accessing Liverpool University Onedrive

The Microsoft Onedrive area provided with your Liverpool University account can be accessed wth rclone. It is best to configure it on a Linux desktop or VNC session as it needs a web browser to confirm the configuration connection.

The instructions on the main rclone website should work using their defaults, see https://rclone.org/onedrive/ using the "Onedrive Personal or Business" for the storage type.

Accessing HEP WISP

The HEP WISP cloud storage service can be accessed using rclone. We suggest only using this for direct file access and listing, don't use it for syncing. To sync directories use the Nextcloud sync client.

Configure with rclone config as usual following the guide on https://rclone.org/webdav/.

For the url use https://wisp.ph.liv.ac.uk/remote.php/dav/files/USERNAME/ where USERNAME is your HEP username.

Select Nextcloud as the name of the webdate service.

Enter your HEP username and password (the password is stored locally in the config file and encrypted).

Further Information

The rclone application has built in help, access it with
  • rclone command --help
eg
  • rclone config --help
Documentation covering usage and configuration is available on the official website https://rclone.org/docs/.
Topic revision: r1 - 17 Nov 2021, JohnBland
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