Tutorial: how to install Rclone and configure Rclone Browser on your Mac [Rclone GUI for MacOS]

9 min readJan 6, 2021

Rclone is a command line program and a basic tool that every Datahoarder should install on the Mac. Why? Because in such way you can transfer / sync / backup data from your Mac to different cloud storage (Google Photos, Google Drive, Backblaze B2, G Suite / Google One / Workspace, Dropbox, Mega NZ, Amazon S3, Amazon Drive, WebDAV cloud services (for example Icedrive, Koofr, FilesFM, 1&1, Magenta, pCloud, Jottacloud, Yandex Disk, Microsoft OneDrive, Box, many more) or even between cloud storage.

This is the first tutorial “DataHoarding for dummies”. I will post more tutorials and datahoarding tools for MacOS in future (just thinking that i’m using more than 20+ YouTube Downloaders xD).

Like we announced on Telegram most of the links don’t work anymore, we will change them for our most important articles with the time, please be patient.

I remember I got the same identical problems once I started my datahoarding activity few years ago, having so many difficulties to understand what I need to write or how i need to do that. Here why i want to share this tutorial with you.

Step 1: Launch Terminal

You can launch Terminal using Spotlight, Alfred, Finder, Launchpad, etc. Or you can right click on the Finder icon on the Dock

Then you choose “Go to folder…” and you write

/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app

Step 2: Install Rclone

To install Rclone you can visit the official webpage, or you can simply follow these steps.

2a) Write this in Terminal (Download the latest version of rclone):

cd && curl -O https://downloads.rclone.org/rclone-current-osx-amd64.zip

2b) Continue by writing this in Terminal (Unzip the download and cd to the extracted folder):

unzip -a rclone-current-osx-amd64.zip && cd rclone-*-osx-amd64

2c) Now you need to write two commands (to move rclone to your $PATH)

2d) First write this in Terminal

sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/bin

You need to insert your password

2e) Now write the second part in Terminal

sudo mv rclone /usr/local/bin/

2f) Last step: remove the leftover files by writing

cd .. && rm -rf rclone-*-osx-amd64 rclone-current-osx-amd64.zip

In case you get an error, try to copy the same command you find it on the official page. You can use Homebrew (brew install rclone) too, if you already own Homebrew, otherwise it requires a bit to install it… See more details below.

Well done! Rclone is now installed. You can access it by using

rclone config

Step 3: Add a cloud storage to Rclone

3a) Write

in Terminal

and choose a name for the cloud storage, like “gsuite” or “gdrive”

3b) You get a list of available cloud storage. Choose 13 for Google Drive, 14 for Google Photos, 9 for Dropbox, 5 for Backblaze B2, 4 for Amazon AWS or Wasabi, 23 for Microsoft OneDrive, 34 for WebDAV, 17 for Jottacloud, 18 for Koofr, 21 for Mega, 26 for pCloud, or check the full list:
1 / 1Fichier
2 / Alias for an existing remote
3 / Amazon Drive
4 / Amazon S3 Compliant Storage Provider (AWS, Alibaba, Ceph, Digital Ocean, Dreamhost, IBM COS, Minio, Scaleway, StackPath, Tencent COS, Wasabi) //PS: COS = Cloud Object Storage
5 / Backblaze B2
6 / Box
7 / Cache a remote
8 / Citrix Sharefile
9 / Dropbox
10 / Encrypt/Decrypt a remote
11 / FTP Connection
12 / Google Cloud Storage (this is not Google Drive)
13 / Google Drive
14 / Google Photos
15 / Hubic (no more available)
16 / In memory object storage system.
17 / Jottacloud
18 / Koofr
19 / Local Disk
20 / Mail.ru Cloud
21 / Mega
22 / Microsoft Azure Blob Storage
23 / Microsoft OneDrive
24 / OpenDrive
25 / OpenStack Swift (Rackspace Cloud Files, Memset Object Storage, OVH Object Storage, Oracle Cloud Storage)
26 / pCloud
27 / Put.io
28 / QingCloud Object Storage
29 / SSH/SFTP Connection
30 / Sugarsync
31 / Tardigrade Decentralized Cloud Storage
32 / Transparently chunk/split large files
33 / Union merges the contents of several upstream fs
34 / WebDAV (Icedrive, FilesFM, 1&1, Magenta, HiDrive, Nextcloud, ownCloud, etc.; plus other services that are already integrated in Rclone)
35 / Yandex Disk
36 / http Connection
37 / premiumize.me
38 / seafile

3c) After that you get a lot of messages, which you can read the first time, and skip it in future. There are 3 important messages, for all other you can just click Enter multiple times

3d) First important message: type of access. I generally choose 1

3e) For advanced config i generally choose n

3f) Then i choose y for auto configuration

3g) Now you need to login to Google and approve Rclone

Once you compile the different steps you get such message. You can close Safari and activate Terminal again

3h) Now you need to choose if you want team drive or not. I generally choose n

3i) After that you need to choose y and then q to quit it

Your cloud storage is now connected to Rclone

Step 4: configure Rclone Browser

First you need to download Rclone Browser and drag drop it to /Applications.

Then you need to launch it, in the same way you launched Terminal too. You can find it under /Applications/Rclone Browser.app

You maybe get such message

In this case i suggest you to write this in terminal (to allow all apps in MacOS):

sudo spctl --master-disable

Generally you see such setting in Apple Security Panel

Once you write such command in terminal (and you need to confirm it by entering your password)

you see it in that way:

Now you can relaunch Rclone Browser without getting any message. If you don’t want such option, you can simply click “Open Anyway” (you see such message at the bottom, always under Security). You can still change your setting to “App Store and identified developers” later.

Once launched, you see such message

Click Ok

Now you can see it in 2 ways; you see it so

where you need to write

/usr/local/bin/rclone

After that you see the full list of data. Or you see it in this way:

You need to configure the settings by writing

/usr/local/bin/rclone

for rclone location, and

/Users/itunesusa/.config/rclone/rclone.conf

for rclone.conf location, by changing “itunesusa” with your username.

After that you can confirm the setting and start to enjoy rclone.

EDIT: Sorry, i missed the new version at all (created by a different developer). After installing new version 1.8 i got a crash on my Sierra Mac. Version 1.7 is still compatible with Sierra. Now i changed the Rclone Browser website with the new Github. Sorry again, but it worked fine, so i hadn’t really needed a new version (except for different missing features, which they still haven’t implemented with version 1.7* too)

*I will test version 1.8 later once i launch my Mojave Mac, but i don’t think they implemented all what i suggested them years ago.

The steps still remain the same, and new version seems identical, there are just some more options.

Here a comparison between old version UI (top or left) and new version UI (bottom or right)

They added an useful feature “Save Task”, to rerun rules later (or you can simply copy the code and paste it in Terminal, but doesn’t work in the last months, worked fine until few months ago)

They removed some features too. I sent now my suggestions i made few years ago to the new dev, in the hope they will implement it.

Alternative way

You can use
brew install rclone
by installing Homebrew (a manager able to install different packages) with
/bin/bash -c “$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

So first install Homebrew with Terminal, then Rclone.

This steps requires some minutes, because you need to install Xcode Command Line Tools

You can use this website to find other commands too or check Homebrew list.

Do you have a Mac with Apple CPU? Check this or this or this

If you get errors

Please retry step 2a — 2f, maybe using directly the commands you see on the Rclone Website if you see any errors. So you can avoid errors generated by Medium.

PS: This was the first time ever i got an error with rclone.conf (you can see a terminal message too). Never got it with all other installation i made before (at least 50x). To be sure i repeat the steps using the commands on the original webpage, instead of using what i wrote in Medium (because Medium sometimes changes characters). At the end i’m still able to use Rclone and Rclone Browser without problems.