rclone Offsite Backup Shell Script

Local backups protect you from a bad deploy or a dropped table — they don’t protect you from the server itself dying. This script uses rclone to push your existing local backup folder to any cloud remote (S3, Backblaze B2, Google Drive, and 40+ others) on a schedule.

What this script does

Syncs a local backup directory to any configured rclone remote
Works with S3, Backblaze B2, Google Drive, or any rclone-supported storage
Logs transfer summary (bytes transferred, errors) for each run
Deletes remote copies older than N days to control storage cost
Exits non-zero on failure so it’s safe to chain after your local backup job

Prerequisites

rclone installed and a remote configured (`rclone config`)
An existing local backup directory populated by another script or cron job
Outbound network access to your chosen cloud provider

Step 1: Save the script

sudo nano /usr/local/bin/rclone-offsite-backup.sh
sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/rclone-offsite-backup.sh

Step 2: Full script (scroll to read)

rclone-offsite-backup.sh

#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -euo pipefail

LOCAL_DIR="/var/backups"
REMOTE="b2:server-backups"          # rclone remote:path — configure with `rclone config`
RETENTION_DAYS=30
LOG="/var/log/rclone-offsite-backup.log"

log(){ echo "[$(date '+%F %T')] $*" | tee -a "$LOG"; }

command -v rclone >/dev/null 2>&1 || { log "ERROR: rclone not installed"; exit 1; }

log "Uploading $LOCAL_DIR to $REMOTE"
if rclone sync "$LOCAL_DIR" "$REMOTE" --log-file="$LOG" --log-level INFO --stats 1m --stats-one-line; then
  log "Offsite sync completed successfully"
else
  log "ERROR: rclone sync failed"
  exit 1
fi

log "Removing remote files older than ${RETENTION_DAYS} days"
rclone delete "$REMOTE" --min-age "${RETENTION_DAYS}d" --log-file="$LOG" --log-level INFO

log "Offsite backup completed"

Scroll inside the box to read the full script.

Step 3: Configure settings

LOCAL_DIR — local backup folder to upload
REMOTE — rclone remote name and path, e.g. b2:server-backups
RETENTION_DAYS — delete remote files older than this
Run rclone config once interactively before first use to authenticate

rclone offsite backup shell script uploading to cloud storage

Step 4: Test manually

sudo /usr/local/bin/rclone-offsite-backup.sh

rclone ls b2:server-backups

Schedule with cron

sudo crontab -e

Add:

30 2 * * * /usr/local/bin/rclone-offsite-backup.sh >> /var/log/rclone-offsite-backup.log 2>&1