I had Google Drive, OneDrive, and Dropbox all installed on my PC at the same time, and it was a mess. Each service came with its own client hogging RAM in the background, its own notification icon, and its own quirky way of handling sync conflicts. As you can probably guess, this made managing files across cloud providers a nightmare.

I wanted something that would collect my scattered cloud storage into one big drive, and thankfully, I found it. Rclone gave me a single folder where all three drives showed up together, and it didn’t cost me a cent.

Rclone connects dozens of cloud storage services from one command line

Rclone is a free, open-source command-line tool that can talk to practically any cloud storage provider out there, including but not limited to Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, Mega, and even self-hosted storage options like Nextcloud. It works like rsync, but instead of syncing folders on your local disk, it treats remote cloud accounts as if they were local directories. Individual drives are configured as remotes, and once set up, Rclone can list, copy, sync, or mount that storage using simple commands, and none of it requires opening a browser tab or installing bloated desktop clients.

There are two ways to set up your cloud accounts in Rclone: using the rclone config command in a terminal or via the included browser interface. Both setup wizards are interactive, so you won’t be out of your depth even if you head for the terminal option. For each service, you pick a name and the corresponding storage type from a numbered list. Rclone then opens your browser for an OAuth login so you authorize access the same way you would for any official app, and once that’s done, the remote is saved in Rclone’s configuration file.

You will have to repeat the process multiple times — once for each service — but you’ll be done in a matter of minutes even if you’re configuring a handful of services. Before you know, you’ll have three independent, working connections that you can test with commands like rclone ls [drive name].

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.

The trick is combining them with a union remote

Rclone’s union backend makes multiple clouds behave like one storage pool

Individual remotes are useful, but they will still show up as three separate drives. If that’s what you’re looking for, you can stop configuring Rclone and start using it. However, if you want all your cloud storage as a single consolidated drive, you can run the rclone config command and choose union as the storage type instead.

This will ask you for a list of upstream remotes separated by spaces, something like “gdrive: mega: onedrive:”. Rclone then treats all mentioned remotes as a single combined filesystem. When you look inside the union, you see every file from every account merged into one directory, and depending on the policies you choose, new files get written to whichever remote has the most free space or to a specific one you designate as the default.

You can also tag any of the upstream remotes as read-only or no-create using suffixes like :ro or :nc, which comes in handy if you want one account to act purely as a backup destination rather than somewhere new files get placed.

Your clouds become a normal folder

Mount the combined storage directly in your file explorer

Configuring the union remote gives you a consolidated filesystem, but it’s still virtual and won’t show up as a folder on your PC just yet. On Linux or macOS, this uses FUSE, and on Windows you’ll need to install WinFSP first since Windows doesn’t have native FUSE support.

Once that’s taken care of, simply run the following command if you’re on Linux:

rclone mount union: /path/to/mount

On Windows, run this instead:

rclone mount union: X:

And that’s it. Your union drive will now show up as a standard folder on your PC. You can access files, copy or move them, and even include flags like –vfs-cache-mode writes to allow programs like text editors to save files properly instead of getting caught by Rclone’s default read-only caching behavior.

The catch with Rclone’s manual mounts is that they will disappear should you close the terminal running Rclone or restart your computer. On Linux, you can avoid this by adding the mount command to your window manager’s startup configuration. On Windows, tools like NSSM let you register the mount command as a background service that starts automatically at boot.

Either way, once it’s set up, you can stop thinking about fiddling with configuration files at all. The folder is just there every time you log in, quietly showing files from multiple cloud accounts as though they’d always lived together.

Is one folder worth the setup?

A little configuration buys you one unified interface for multiple clouds

Basic Rclone setup can be done in minutes, but when you add making mounting drives persistent, including any flags you’d need, and other gotchas, it can still take the better part of an hour. Regardless, once you get it right, it’s well worth the time spent. It’s one of the Docker containers that made my home server worth it.

It’s not going to replace dedicated backup software if you need automated redundancy across multiple accounts, but as a way to browse and use scattered storage like one unified drive, Rclone is hard to beat, especially since it’s completely free and works identically regardless of which OS you’re using.