Alabhya Jindal

Sync notes with Rclone

Nov 6, 2025

I'm using Rclone to sync the Notes folder on my computer to Dropbox. I use the Crypt feature to encrypt my files before upload, and a shell script for automatic sync.

To do this, I installed Rclone, and set it up so it has two remotes.

~ rclone config
Current remotes:

Name                 Type
====                 ====
dropbox              dropbox
secret               crypt

# --snip--

I have a sync_notes file in /etc/cron.daily with the following contents:

#!/bin/bash

if su alabhya -c "rclone sync /home/alabhya/Documents/Notes secret: --log-file /home/alabhya/.rclone.log"; then
    echo "=== Sync completed at $(date) ===" >> /home/alabhya/.rclone.log
fi

This is made executable by running chmod +x ./sync_notes. It is executed daily by anacron. The log file tracks the time when the last sync took place, and any potential errors.

 ~ cat ~/.rclone.log
=== Sync completed at Sat Nov  1 04:27:00 PM IST 2025 ===
=== Sync completed at Mon Nov  3 09:21:09 AM IST 2025 ===
=== Sync completed at Tue Nov  4 08:49:40 AM IST 2025 ===
=== Sync completed at Wed Nov  5 08:13:08 AM IST 2025 ===
=== Sync completed at Thu Nov  6 08:28:09 AM IST 2025 ===