Rclone author ncw (Nick Craig-Wood) announced that Rclone has been born for 10 years, and posted the first commit of Rclone 10 years ago:

commit e9ae4f89a44b1cac8e83ede1572f15dace692c67
Author: Nick Craig-Wood <nick@craig-wood.com>
Date:   Sun Nov 18 17:32:31 2012 +0000

    Initial commit - some small parts working

Rclone is an open source command-line program written in Go for managing cloud storage and synchronizing files and directories between different cloud storage providers. Its features include file synchronization, file transfer, encryption, caching and mounting. Rclone supports a total of more than fifty cloud storage services including Amazon S3 and Google Cloud, supporting object storage, enterprise and consumer file storage, services, and standard transfer protocols.

Rclone was originally inspired by rsync (rsync is a well-known Linux file synchronization tool), so until now it still introduces itself as “rsync for cloud storage“.

According to ncw, rclone was just a small project at first, and its first public version (v0.96) only supports 3 cloud storage backends:swift,driveands3. He created this project to learn Go language and familiarize himself with the swift backend used in his work projects. In the process of maintaining rclone, ncw thought it could support more cloud storage services and be a useful tool for others.

So in the next 10 years, the number of cloud storage backends supported by rclone gradually accumulated to more than 50, including more than 80 commands. On GitHub, the number of stars of rclone has increased from 0 to more than 30,000.

As of today, Rclone has released 87 versions, a total of 666 different developers have submitted PRs, resulting in 4635 issues, of which only 754 have not been processed (16%). The number of PRs was 1,878, only 92 were not processed (5%).