OneDrive on Linux: Take 3

I wrote about rclone yesterday, which claims to sync your OneDrive files to your Linux host. This is something that Microsoft has failed to provide to the Linux community. I was hoping to gather all of my files, and then Jenny’s files, to one main source in the house, and have that sync with OneDrive in order to get the whole cloud thing sorted finally. I think this is still possible, but not with rclone.

Take a look at this:

See that /dev/sdb1 ? That is the physical 1TB external drive.
See that onedrive: ? That is the onedrive folder “on” that 1TB drive.
How is it possible that the /dev/sdb1 shows 916G total and only 1% usage, but a folder on that device is 1.1TB with 63% usage? Answer: it can’t be.

What we are looking at is not a sync, but rather a FUSE overlay. I could probably have popped in a 1GB USB thumbdrive, mapped the “onedrive” on to that, and it would have worked (961GB < 1.1TB).

In my testing, I did open nano and write a test file “on” this onedrive folder. It was instantly synced to my Windows 10 desktop. So that works great. It is just that I am looking to have the files housed locally, as well as synced to OneDrive in the cloud. The reason I need them locally is to be able to set up a SAMBA share to them and have them available even if the Internet is down.

I say that I think this is possible because I already have seen it in action. That is why this is “Take 3”. The first time I did it was on Manjaro. I verified the files were on the laptop hard drive before I blew away Manjaro and installed Mint. The problem is that I wasn’t 100% sure if it was fully working or not, which is why I even bothered looking at rclone. I found this site, which has a table of the possible OneDrive for Linux solutions on it. The fourth option down is what I used on Manjaro, and, specifically, the abraun fork of that. So that is what I am going to try and get going on my Pi now.

rclone is a worthy project. If they could get the writes to actually take place, I would probably switch back to it. I have other files trapped out in the other clouds that I would like to gain access to without having to install their Windows client software. In the early days, I had like six different “clouds” that I was saving files to, and that was just crushing my machine.

This is a follow-up. Debian has onedrive in the repos!
sudo apt install onedrive
and then configure it and do an initial sync to download the files.
Follow the examples in USAGE.md.

Follow-up to the follow-up. Things are going great! The initial sync needs some babysitting, as it craps out after a large copy for some reason, but I’ve looked at the SAMBA share and have actually mapped a drive to it! This is is roughly what I am looking to accomplish, if you’ll take my meaning.