The File Fabric is now supported by Rclone 1.54 release

We are pleased to announce that the File Fabric has been added as an Rclone connector in the newly released 1.54  version of Rclone.

Rclone is a free open source command line tool that works across Windows, Mac and Linux to sync and work with remotely stored files.

In concept it is similar to Rsync and Rdiff and if you would like to know more about it you can listen too our recent podcast with the founder of Rclone, Nick Craig-Wood.

The help pages for the File Fabric and Rclone can be found here.

Let’s take a look at Rclone by installing it, in this case on a Linux system via the terminal:

curl https://rclone.org/install.sh | sudo bash

Once installed Rclone can be configured by running the Rclone configuration:

rclone config

and stepping through the wizard of which the first step is to start the process of adding a new ‘remote’ (the storage connector you are working with, in this case the File Fabric) with the first step being to name the remote that you are adding.

You can name the remote anything you want but you should ideally make it a single word such, for example, ‘JimEFFUS‘ – representing the name of the user account, the abbreviation for the Enterprise File Fabric, and that it is for the US service.

Once name you will be ask to choose the remote you wish to work with and presented with a list to choose from:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the current release of Rclone (1.54) the File Fabric is number 12.

You will then be asked to nominate the endpoint you wish to connect to. If you are using the US or EU hosted service you can choose option 1 or 2. If you have an enterprise on-premises version of the File Fabric you can choose option 3 and define your own end-point.

The next step is to define a folder ID and unless you wish Rclone to be targeted to specific folder you should leave this blank.

Lastly you will be asked for a secure authentication token to enable Rclone to communicate with the File Fabric.  You can obtain this by logging into your File Fabric account and navigating to the Dashboard and clicking on the ‘My Authentication tokens‘ ‘Manage‘ button.

In the resultant screen choose to create a new token and name it Rclone.

(If you wish to remove authorisation at any point you can return to this screen and delete the authentication token name Rclone.)

Once this is done have completed the wizard and you can choose ‘y’ to exit.

At this point you have a working Rclone installation that works with the File Fabric.

if you want to list all the directories under the root of your account type:

rclone lsf remotename:

**note that the remotename is the name of the remote as per the first step above and that is followed by a colon (:)

If you want to copy some files from a local folder names ‘docs’ into a File Fabric Directory called ‘archive’ you could issue the following command:

rclone copy /docs remotename:archive

As the File Fabric’s global file system is actually a representation of a storage resource the folder name of course be stored on whatever resource it is mapped to under the File Fabric ie. Amazon S3, Azure, SMB etc.

In some cases Rclone supports those storage clouds direct and indeed if you chose to upload the files direct the File Fabric’s indexer would pick those new files / folders / objects up and they would simply appear in the global file system. However if they are uploaded through the File Fabric the File Fabric’s even auditing / logging / PHI / Ransomware protection kicks in at the point of upload and works transparently against the new data, preventing the data being available as a data resource if issues are protected.

Rclone can also be useful for data that is already mapped via the File Fabric. For example it can be used to de-dupe. It can also be used to script interactions with Files and Objects available via the File Fabric, stream media,  and much more.

We will highlight some of the ways that Rclone can be used with the File Fabric in some follow up blog post articles.

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