A surprising amount of the world’s important data moves through a command-line tool called rclone. System administrators rely on it for overnight server backups, research teams use it to archive large datasets across institutions, and developers lean on it to migrate between cloud providers without writing custom code. With support for more than 70 cloud storage products, it has become a standard part of the toolkit for anyone who manages data at scale.
Starting with rclone v1.76.0, Auto Drive, Autonomys Network’s gateway to permanent storage, is one of the destinations rclone can reach.
Users often call rclone the Swiss army knife of cloud storage. You set up a remote once, point a command at it, and rclone handles the differences between storage systems on your behalf. Its core audience is the system administrators, data engineers, and infrastructure leads who decide where an organization’s files live. They choose tools carefully, since a poor choice can mean higher costs, outages, or lost records, and once a tool earns a place in their workflow it tends to stay there.
Auto Drive offers an S3-compatible application programming interface (API), the same kind of interface Amazon S3 uses, so rclone connects to it through its standard S3 settings. Setup takes an API key from ai3.storage and a short entry in your rclone config file. From there, the commands and scripts a team already runs can send files to Auto Drive, where they stay available permanently with no pinning or subscription renewals to manage.
Because nothing stored on Auto Drive can be removed, rclone can add files there but not delete them, so the setup guide recommends using rclone copy rather than rclone sync.
rclone joins the ways people already use Auto Drive. Anyone can drag and drop files into ai3.storage much as they would with Google Drive, and developers can build lasting storage into an application with a few lines of code. This integration extends the same access to engineers and infrastructure teams who would rather keep working in the tools they already trust.
A research institution can point rclone at Auto Drive and keep years of scientific data available without a subscription to renew or a vendor that might discontinue its product. A developer moving off a legacy cloud provider can keep their existing tooling, and a team backing up critical records gets verifiable storage through a tool it already knows.
The timing also matters for companies working to meet Article 12 of the EU AI Act, which requires high-risk AI systems to automatically record events over their lifetime. Tamper-evident, permanent storage can help support that kind of record-keeping, and rclone gives teams a simple route for getting logs there.
That has been the promise behind Auto Drive from the start, and rclone brings it to a much larger group of people. Teams don’t need to understand how Auto Drive works under the hood, since permanence is built into the network itself and applies as soon as files arrive.
Auto Drive is free to start. You can create an account and generate an API key at ai3.storage, and the rclone setup guide walks through the configuration step by step.
Want the full technical story? Our forum deep dive covers the S3 compatibility work behind the integration, from multipart ETags to moving the S3 API off our CDN. It’s written for developers, so expect protocol-level detail.
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