It’s easy to get a free 5GB, 10GB, or 15GB of cloud storage here and there, and that’s exactly what I’ve spent several years doing. But accessing and saving data was very disjointed, as I would juggle several accounts before deciding where to store my files.

One day, I decided to take stock of what I actually had. It turned out to be 95GB of free storage quotas scattered across nine accounts and seven providers. This was plenty but too scattered to be practical for daily workflows.

One free tool, and about 30 minutes of setup later, I was able to access all accounts from a central point.

The nine-account haul

MEGA beat every Google account

MEGA gave me 20GB of free storage, which was more than the free storage quota on any single Google account I own. However, I had three Google accounts, and stacked together, they gave me 45GB of free storage. The other accounts combined contributed 30GB of free storage. Of these, OneDrive was just 5GB, but it’s an account most people who use Windows already have.

Although this added up to 95GB, it wasn’t a single generous plan. The total hides the real experience of owning several small storage quotas.

Daily use meant navigating. Nine logins meant nine dashboards, and they often came with their own quirks, separate upload limits, and another way to lose track of files even when I was confident I knew where I’d kept them.

Stitching nine clouds together

One union remote — and the logins that fought back

rclone was the tool that transformed my chaos into a workable, practical setup for daily use. First, I installed rclone on my Windows computer by running this command in PowerShell:

winget install rclone.rclone

The way it works almost feels boring. I first had to make each account its own remote. The process starts by running rclone config, selecting n, hitting Enter, and following the prompts, with the exact steps varying slightly for each service.

Connecting the accounts was the most complex part of the entire process. I had to generate an API key from Filen’s dashboard to complete its addition. I had to generate an app password in Koofr’s dashboard as well. OneDrive presented several drives, and it only worked when I picked the right personal drive. I encountered errors during some logins, but mainly just had to read the instructions on the terminal to fix the problem.

Once I was done, I confirmed the remote was properly set up by running the command rclone lsd . In some cases, this command outputs the directories within that storage account. A successful command that returns nothing can also be normal if the remote has no directories at its root.

Once all the remotes were properly connected, I created the merge with a single config block: a new remote called CloudUnion. I listed all the other remotes I added as upstreams on a single line.

I individually tested each account before creating CloudUnion so that if anything had broken during the merge, I’d be sure the issue wasn’t buried in one of the nine separate logins.

One window, nine clouds

Drag, drop, and let the pool decide where it lands

Once I had completed the setup, the first real proof that my scattered storage was accessible centrally came when I ran the command: rclone lsd CloudUnion:I could see Documents, Pictures, and my Personal vault from OneDrive sitting beside folders from my Google Drive, and other services. All of them sat in a central path. But this all happened on my terminal, which still made it feel like a geeky solution.

So I downloaded and installed another tool called RcloneView. It’s a free GUI tool for cloud file sync and backup, but it has paid tiers. Once I launched it, it picked up the CloudUnion remote I’d just created and brought the merging that seemed a bit abstract in the terminal to life.

In the left pane of RcloneView, I could see the CloudUnion remote I had just created, and underneath it were folders from all the accounts I merged, sorted alphabetically. I literally had my Google Drive accounts, OneDrive, Proton Drive, pCloud, and the rest, accessible right in front of me.

A process that used to require me to hunt through several accounts now only required me to open one application on my computer. The whole disjointed 95GB of storage quotas felt like a single pool of folders that I could explore.

I could drag files from my computer into individual folders of the CloudUnion remote, and I could also mount the remote as a local drive. Underneath, I still had nine separate accounts, but I was no longer dealing with them individually.

Where 95GB stops

When I ran rclone about CloudUnion:, it gave me an output that I can’t totally explain: Total 95GB, Used 8.298GB, Free 79.380GB. The math doesn’t quite add up when you consider Used and Free.

Rclone’s about command reports quota information from the remote, but not every storage backend exposes every quota field in the same way. So I wouldn’t treat the CloudUnion figures as a precise accounting of every byte across my nine accounts. But that’s a limitation of this merge you may experience if you’re considering it.

The unexplained 7.322GB was a reminder that the neat 95GB number on paper doesn’t translate into one perfectly measurable pool in practice. Still, this was all free storage, and I had not spent a dime to merge them. For the first time, those free storage accounts didn’t feel like separate places I had to choose between.

OS

macOS, Linux, Windows

Price model

Free

rclone is a command-line program that manages files on cloud storage. The tool gives an alternative to cloud vendors’ web storage interfaces.