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I'm using rclone to copy a shared Google Drive folder, but I'm running into a problem: when copying the same folder to the same location over and over again, rclone creates new folders each time, each a duplicate to an existing folder in the folder. I believe this is due to the fact that rclone only considers two files identical if they match name, hash and mod-time, rather than just name. So, is there a flag I can pass to rclone so it will skip based only on identical file names? I tried --ignore-existing but it didn't work.

An example: rclone copy remote:folder_to_copy_from remote: --drive-folder-id=id_of_folder_to_copy_to copies folder_to_copy_from/a.txt to folder_to_copy_to, even if folder_to_copy_to/a.txt exists.

StarDust
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2 Answers2

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Apparently all you needed was --ignore-existing at the end.

StarDust
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    Strange that you said you already tried it and it didn't work but now it does. If you figure out what changed, let us know. – NetServOps Jun 21 '21 at 03:35
  • @NetServOps Maybe it's because I removed the `--drive-shared-with-me`? – StarDust Jun 21 '21 at 15:35
  • `rclone check remote:folder_to_copy_from remote:folder_to_copy_to --size-only --one-way --missing-on-dst A.txt` confirmed this. – StarDust Jun 21 '21 at 15:50
  • confirmed what? you latest comment showed that you didn't include `--ignore-existing` however you answer said you move it to the end the command; are you saying you replaced `ignore-existing` with `--missing-on-dst`? – stucash Dec 20 '22 at 07:15
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If you have many files in /path/to/src but only a few of them change every day, you can copy all the files which have changed recently very efficiently like this:

rclone copy --max-age 24h --no-traverse /path/to/src remote:

Note: Use the -P/--progress flag to view real-time transfer statistics.

Note: Use the --dry-run or the --interactive/-i flag to test without copying anything.

rclone copy source:path dest:path [flags]

Source - https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_copy/

Note that it is always the contents of the directory that is synced, not the directory so when source:path is a directory, it's the contents of source:path that are copied, not the directory name and contents.

If dest:path doesn't exist, it is created and the source:path contents go there.

NetServOps
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  • Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been [moved to chat](https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/126714/discussion-on-answer-by-netservops-rclone-how-to-skip-copying-files-if-there-is). – DavidPostill Jun 21 '21 at 07:02