rClone Set up – connect to your bucket

1. Now head to your Proxmox server and connect to it ideally via SSH to run the following commands. If you do not have rclone installed installer, run:
   • apt-get install rclone -y
   • rclone version
2. If you geta version on 1.5x, then rclone authentication during config will not work and a manual upgrade of rclone is required first. Run the following (assuming you are connected to Proxmox’s terminal as a root):
   • -v ; curl https://rclone.org/install.sh | bash
   • rclone version
3. Then start the rclone config process (as per rclone’s GCP documentation):
   • rclone config
   • n for New Remote
   • Name it – such as proxmox-gcp
   • Choose Google Cloud Storage (option number 16 but that can change in newer versions of rclone).
   • client_id —> skip, press enter
   • client_secret —>skip, press enter
   • project-number —> Find out in the ‘Project Settings’ section in GCP
   • user_project —> skip, press enter
   • service_account_file —> skip, press enter
   • anonymous —> we want false, so press enter
   • object_acl —> we only want the owner to get access, so press enter or choose 4
   • bucket_acl —> we want the private option (option 2)
   • bucket_policy_only —> leave default (press enter)
   • location —> select the location in which you created the bucket
   • storage_class —> choose you storage tier that you selected during the bucket creation process, such as Archive (option 6)
   • env_auth —> press 1 and enter
   • Edit advance config? —> type n and press enter
   • Use Web Browser to authenticate rclone —> type n and press enter
   • Use advanced config? —> type n and press enter
   • Now you will need to download rclone on your actual personal computer (or a remote server with a browser) and open terminal there. Let’s say you are running Windows, then:
     • Download the package from rclone
     • Unpack the zip file somewhere easy to find (such as C:\temp\rclone)
     • Open the command line or PowerShell and run the cd commands to get there (such as ‘cd C:\temp\rclone’).
     • Test that rclone works by running 'rclone version‘.
     • Copy paste the command supplied by your proxmox server, it starts with ‘rclone authorize’ . Your browser will open to complete the authentication. Once done, the browser window can be closed – check your terminal window that will read ‘Paste the following into your remote machine –→’.
     • Copy paste the token and paste it into Proxmox to complete the process.
     • Lastly, confirm the ‘Is it okay?’ prompt.
4. Now you can verify that the GCP bucket is accessible:
   • Run ‘rclone lsd remotename:bucketname’, e.g. ‘rclone lsd proxmox-gcp:proxmox-backup-bachelor’ . It should show nothing as the bucket was just created and is empty (lsd = list directories).
   • Run a ‘touch /tmp/test.txt’ and then try copying a file to it such as ‘rclone --gcs-bucket-policy-only copy /tmp/test.txt proxmox-gcp:proxmox-backup-bachelor’ (the output should, again, be nothing).
   • Then run ‘rclone ls proxmox-gcp:proxmox-backup-bachelor’ to view that the file is on it. You should see the file listed.
   • Lastly, let’s delete the file to verify that we have delete permissions on the buckets’ objects, too. Run ‘rclone --gcs-bucket-policy-only delete proxmox-gcp:proxmox-backup-bachelor/test.txt’.

Great, now you can upload / download / delete files to / from your bucket, so we can proceed with mounting it automatically on reboot.