Connecting rclone to SharePoint Online

Wed, 19 Mar 2025 15:18:48 -0400

Connecting rclone to SharePoint Online

I found the official instructions for this extremely difficult to follow, so here’s what worked for me, with an Office 365 Business tenant.

First you need to create a custom client id. The default client ID will likely end up getting throttled, and the token will expire after an hour or so, causing your operations to stall.

App Registration

Open this link and log in with an administrator account that has privileges to create a new app registration for your tenant.
Click “New registration”
Give your app a name, I just called mine “rclone”.
For Supported account types, you want the “Accounts in this organizational directory only” option.
create a redirect URI of type Web. Type (don’t copy and paste) this into the URI field. http://localhost:53682/. Don’t miss the trailing slash.
Copy and keep the Application (client) ID under the app name for later use.
Under manage select Certificates & secrets, click New client secret. Enter a description (can be anything) and set Expires to however long you’d like. Copy and keep that secret Value for later use (you won’t be able to see this value afterwards).
Under Manage select API Permissions. Click “add a permission” and select Microsoft Graph. You want “Application Permissions”, not “Delegated permissions”.
Give the API key the following permissions:
- Files.ReadWrite
- Files.Read.All
- Files.ReadWrite.All
- User.Read
- Sites.Read.All
Click the button for “Grant Admin consent for ”

Create rclone remote

rclone config
Give the remote a name
Select 35 for OneDrive.
Enter your client ID and client secret when prompted.
When you get to the step where it asks you to authenticate in a browser, it will likely fail no matter what you do. This is okay.
Open your rclone.conf in a text editor. On Linux it’s by default in $HOME/.config/rclone

vim $HOME/rclone/rclone.conf
In the app registration you created earlier you can find the tenant ID in the overview. You can also find it in the Entra ID admin panel. Save that value.

Add the following lines to your rclone.conf

auth_url = https://login.microsoftonline.com/YOUR_TENANT_ID/oauth2/v2.0/authorize
token_url = https://login.microsoftonline.com/YOUR_TENANT_ID/oauth2/v2.0/token
tenant = YOUR_TENANT_ID
client_credentials = true

Getting the DriveId

Next, get the DriveID of the SharePoint site that you’re trying to create a remote for.

We’ll be using the Microsoft Graph PowerShell module for this. You’ll want to connect to Graph with a user that has admin privileges.

The “site-name” mentioned here is the same one at the end of the SharePoint link, like

https://contoso.sharepoint.com/sites/Accounting

So in this case, Accounting would be the site name.

Connect-MgGraph -Scopes "Sites.Read.All"
$site = Get-MgSite -Search "Site-name"
$drive = Get-MgSiteDrive -SiteId $site.Id
$drive | Format-List

The last command here will print quite a bit of information - there may be more than one document library associated with a single SharePoint site, especially if you’ve enabled Teams for that site.

Add this as a line to your configured Sharepoint remote.

drive_id = DRIVE_ID_HERE
drive_type = documentLibrary

Attempt reconnection

Run the following command:

rclone config reconnect <remotename>:

At this point you should be able to follow the steps and get rclone connected.

You can verify by running:

rclone ls <remotename>:

Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure there are some unnecessary steps here, but this is what I did, and it works.

It will allow you to connect rclone to SharePoint with a custom client ID and avoid it timing out after an hour or so.

I used this to migrate 3TB of data from a SharePoint site to a local NAS.

Additional tips

If you still run into issues with rate limiting, you can look into the --tpslimit, --transfers or --checkers options to limit the number of API calls rclone is making to SharePoint. I wound up using --tpslimit 10. It copied at a reasonable speed without making Microsoft throttle me down to nothing.

rclone official website

Sharepoint on Sysadmin Tales

Connecting rclone to SharePoint Online

Connecting rclone to SharePoint Online

App Registration

Create rclone remote

Getting the DriveId

Attempt reconnection

Additional tips