Backing up Google Drive to a VPS with rclone
The article discusses how to back up Google Drive to a VPS using rclone. It outlines the setup process, including the use of cron jobs and Docker for efficient backups. The author emphasizes the importance of maintaining access to files outside of Google Drive to prevent data loss.
- ▪The author uses a VPS to create a backup of Google Drive files to avoid losing access to them.
- ▪A cron job is set up to run rclone copy every six hours, ensuring regular backups.
- ▪The setup involves using Docker to run rclone without installing it directly on the server.
2 outlets in our directory ran this story. All of the coverage we found sits in one bucket: centre. That one-sidedness is itself worth noticing.
- ▪ Backing up Google Drive to a VPS with rclone — r/selfhosted
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | Ilakovac |
| Canonical URL | https://ilakovac.com/backing-up-google-drive-to-a-vps/ |
| Publication time | Wed, 03 Jun 2026 09:22:35 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-06-03T09:42:00.459Z |
| Last seen | 2026-06-03T09:42:00.459Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | bT66-wr2MJhg · 2 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
June 2nd, 2026 Backing up Google Drive to a VPS with rclone By Mihovil Ilakovac — 6 min read Contents What did I want from this?The duct tape backup jobGoogle OAuth can bite youOne small Docker mount trapAnother easy way to break cronThe actual copy commandHealthchecks.ioWhat about logs?Some things to keep in mind I use Google Drive because it is convenient and I am too lazy to move everything somewhere else right now. But one thing kept bothering me: what happens if I lose access to the account? The files may still exist somewhere in Google land, but that does not help me much if I cannot get to them. So I made a small escape hatch: a backup on infrastructure I own or rent. In my case, a VPS disk. TLDR: A cron job runs rclone copy in Docker.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Ilakovac.
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