Overview

A local copy of a private OneDrive on a QNAP NAS at home. The NAS collects the data on its own every night with rclone, so no PC has to be running. Traffic goes one way only: from the cloud to the NAS.

A sync on its own is not a backup — if a file disappears in OneDrive, a plain mirror deletes it too. So nothing is thrown away here: whatever is deleted or overwritten in the cloud is moved into a dated version folder on the NAS.

Setup

Addresses and user names are placeholders. Folder names are shown in English here; on the NAS they are German (aktuell, versionen).

1. Get rclone onto the NAS

   The NAS cannot download it itself — its certificate store is too old for today’s HTTPS. So the ARM build is downloaded on the PC, copied to /share/Public/rclone/ with scp and made executable. Below, rclone is short for that full path.

2. Sign in to OneDrive on the Windows PC

   The Microsoft login needs a browser, so rclone config runs on Windows: remote name onedrive, type OneDrive Personal. Quick check:

   .\rclone.exe lsd onedrive:

3. Copy the finished config to the NAS

   scp "$env:APPDATA\rclone\rclone.conf" <user>@<nas-ip>:/root/.config/rclone/rclone.conf

   On the NAS, rclone lsd onedrive: now lists the top-level OneDrive folders.

4. Create target folders and do a dry run

   mkdir -p /share/CACHEDEV1_DATA/OneDrive-Backup/current /share/CACHEDEV1_DATA/OneDrive-Backup/versions
   rclone sync onedrive: /share/CACHEDEV1_DATA/OneDrive-Backup/current --dry-run --max-depth 2

5. Start the first full sync in the background

   setsid keeps it alive after the SSH window closes; the flags keep it inside the 1 GB of RAM the NAS has.

   setsid rclone sync onedrive: /share/CACHEDEV1_DATA/OneDrive-Backup/current \
     --backup-dir /share/CACHEDEV1_DATA/OneDrive-Backup/versions/$(date +%Y-%m-%d) \
     --transfers 1 --checkers 1 --tpslimit 5 --buffer-size 0 --use-mmap --no-traverse \
     --log-file /share/CACHEDEV1_DATA/OneDrive-Backup/rclone.log --log-level INFO \
     < /dev/null > /dev/null 2>&1 &

6. Schedule the nightly job

   On QNAP the entry has to live in /etc/config/crontab — anything added with crontab -e is gone after the next reboot.

   crontab /etc/config/crontab
   /etc/init.d/crond.sh restart

7. Make it visible in Windows

   In QTS, create a shared folder OneDrive-Backup and point it at the existing folder via “enter folder path manually”. It then shows up in Explorer under \\<nas-ip>\OneDrive-Backup.

Schedule

The cron line — note that % has to be escaped as \% inside a crontab:

30 2 * * * rclone sync onedrive: /share/CACHEDEV1_DATA/OneDrive-Backup/current --backup-dir /share/CACHEDEV1_DATA/OneDrive-Backup/versions/$(date +\%Y-\%m-\%d) --transfers 1 --checkers 1 --tpslimit 5 --buffer-size 0 --use-mmap --no-traverse --log-file /share/CACHEDEV1_DATA/OneDrive-Backup/rclone.log --log-level INFO

Folders

versions/ stays empty after the first run and starts filling from the second one on.

Lessons learned

Status

• As long as the job runs regularly, rclone renews the OneDrive token by itself. After a long pause or a password change: run rclone config reconnect onedrive: on the PC and copy the config to the NAS again.