Rclone is a command line cloud storage synchronization program that allows accessing and synchronizing files between your filesystem and cloud storage services, or between multiple cloud storage services. Recent versions also come with a Web GUI, and there are third-party GUIs available as well, like Rclone Browser.
The tool supports many cloud storage providers like Amazon S3, Box, Dropbox, Google Drive / Photos / Cloud Storage, Mega, Microsoft OneDrive (personal and business), pCloud, Yandex Disk and more. It's available for Windows, macOS, Linux and *BSD.
This article shows how to encrypt cloud storage files from a remote (a remote is a cloud storage provider that's configured in Rclone) using Rclone. It assumes you've already added some cloud storage providers to your Rclone configuration; if not, download and install Rclone, run
rclone config, choose New remote and add Google Drive, OneDrive or any other cloud storage supported by Rclone.For encryption, we'll use the
crypt Rclone remote. It's worth noting from the start that only the files copied / synchronized to the crypt remote will be encrypted, so you can continue to upload unencrypted files if you wish, exactly as before; this also means that any files previously uploaded to the cloud storage are not encrypted, and this will not encrypt them unless you delete the files from the cloud storage and then store them in the new crypt remote.The Rclone crypt option can encrypt the files, file names (standard file name encryption or simple file name obfuscation) and directory names. The file length and modification time are not encrypted.