KEIBIDROP and rclone

Storage behind a provider, or the other machine's folder.

By Marius-Florin Cristian · 2 September 2026

rclone mounts storage that lives behind a provider, so there is a bucket, an account and a bill somewhere. KEIBIDROP mounts one machine's folder on another directly, with no provider and no account, and a read pulls only the bytes it touches.

Side by side

KEIBIDROPrclone
Storage provider neededNoneYes
AccountNoneProvider account
10,000 file tree usable on the peer0.12 s1.9 s cold enumerate
Re-read after a same-size in place edit16 MB moved, byte exact0 bytes moved, stale content
Filesystem driverOn the mounting sideOn the mounting side
EncryptionEnd to end, X25519 with ML-KEM-1024Provider transport, or rclone crypt
Source codeOpen, MPL-2.0Open, MIT
Number of backendsOne, a peerDozens of providers

No provider, no bucket, no account

KEIBIDROP joins two machines directly and the folder stays where it already is, so nothing is uploaded to a third party first and there is no storage bill. rclone reaches storage through a provider.

An edit on the origin reaches the reader

On the same machine on the same day, a 2 MB in place edit inside a file left rclone's mount serving the old bytes, and it stayed stale after ls -la and a forced rclone rc vfs/refresh recursive=true. KEIBIDROP moved 16 MB and matched byte for byte, because the origin pushes an announce rather than the reader polling size and modification time. Conditions: rclone v1.75.0, rclone serve sftp on localhost with --vfs-cache-mode full, macFUSE, loopback, measured 14 August 2026.

Fair to rclone on the same run

On the cold 256 MB read rclone moved fewer wire bytes, 268 MB against 293 MB, which is plain SFTP framing against AEAD framing and puts the cost of end to end encryption at about 9 percent. rclone also needs the same FUSE driver on every platform, so a driver is not a difference between the two.

Limits

Common questions

Do I need a storage provider?

No. KeibiDrop joins two machines directly and the folder stays where it already is. rclone reaches storage through a provider.

Why did rclone serve stale content after an edit?

A same size in place edit does not change the size or, in that run, trigger invalidation, and rclone over SFTP has no push channel from the origin. KeibiDrop's origin announces the change, so the reader learns about it.

Does KeibiDrop avoid a FUSE driver?

No. Both need a driver on the machine that mounts, so that is not a difference between them.

Related

Compared with Blip · Compared with LocalSend · Compared with croc · Install