Leveraging rclone to save with cloud providers

#1

I had an epiphany today, and you know how painful that can be.

I’m already using rclone to serve up local files, which in turn get served up by tailscale. There are many cloud services out there, most of them with at least some level of free service. But none of them can be used directly to save TiddlyWiki files because they either don’t offer webdav or they offer a type of webdav that doesn’t allow true interaction without an app.

But you can use rclone to serve up files from those services, and (with some caveats) they will save back with the TW webdav. The advantage of this approach over say, TiddlyHost, is that you can also store images and other resources in a relative directory, and view them inside your TW file. You can also mount the service as a drive, for when you want to manage the drive like a local directory.

For each service that you want to set up, you run the rclone config command

rclone config

Then you step through the questions it asks to create a configuration that can then be used like a virtual connection to that cloud drive.

For example, Koofr is a service that offers 10 gig of space. The configuration is straight-forward. In my example, I created a configuration koofr. The command to serve up the koofr system is:

rclone serve webdav koofr:/ --addr :8090 --vfs-cache-mode full

Now you can go in your browser and browse your files at 127.0.0.1:8090.

The flag --vfs-cache-mode helps system cache changes, which makes a big difference in the time it takes to save.

With koofr, but none of the other services, I had to save the TW file with an “.aspx” extension. I don’t know why.

I also tried google drive, onedrive, and pcloud. They all worked, but I was only testing with an “empty” file. So not sure how it will all go with bigger files.

Google drive was the hardest to set up. There is a long page of instructions at the rclone site on how to do it. But I had already done part of the set up 4 years ago, so I was good to go. Hopefully it works for people starting fresh.

So, this is all experimental, but interesting. Google drive didn’t want to serve up any files by Microsoft. This might be a google API thing. I didn’t care about those, but it was worrisome. OneDrive doesn’t seem to be able (on rclone) to navigate directories with spaces in their names, so that might limit what directories you can use.

I didn’t get around to saving on dropbox. Not sure if I still have an account.

Something to look into some other time is if configurations can be exported and then used in RCX on Android.

So anyway, I thought people might find this interesting. Use with caution, obviously.

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#2

I could indeed transfer my Koofr configuration to RCX and then serve it up. It still needed the .aspx extension, but it actually worked.

#3

Mark, Depending on the platform, if you can save your TiddlyWiki as a file (single file wikis) most cloud platforms do offer their own synchronisation for example one dive, Drop Box etc… For me I still use Timimi to save to local disk, if I wanted this could be a folder that is synchronised to a cloud drive.

Also be aware a new opportunity exists within TiddlyDesktopTS, its android version and the special cloud mirror plugin, that allows sync on the LAN or Internet via a relay. This spectacularly allows a byte by byte sync when editing the same tiddler, you can see simultaneous cursors. Its brilliant.

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#4

The idea is to provide a multi-platform solution that doesn’t depend on the often temporary enthusiasm of community members.

e.g. Timimi is no longer supported.

Having everything write directly to a cloud storage means that you can access your notes anywhere that you have connectivity, and backups are often handled for you automatically.

#5

I understand, see recent discussions on TiddlyWiki-app, but this may be a reason to use a Generic Cloud solution.

Yet I am jumping on board of TiddlyDeskTopTS on Desktop and Android and is has a LAN and Internet relay to distribute changes, without an underlying cloud storage.

It is still working in my Firefox and someone has a modified version in Chrome, which I have not used yet.

  • As far as I know this is a manual modification.

Yes, this can be achieved for files generically without any knowledge of TiddlyWiki but as you raise they may not provide WebDav although from memory Microsoft’s SharePoint/O365 environment used to. But WebDav is only one mechanism to get TiddlyWiki single file to save through. Even the default download mechanism is one.

In other words you could have different save tiddlywiki mechanism’s on multiple devices that read and save to a local folder but un-beknowns to them there is a cloud synchronisation occurring to and from changes to files.