pCloud

At a glance

Capability	Support
rclone support tier	Tier 1: Core
Checksums	SHA-1, SHA-256
Modification times	Kept, to 1 s
Case-insensitive names	No
Duplicate names allowed	No
Server-side copy	Yes
Server-side move and rename	Yes
Folder move and rename	Yes, in one step
Free space reporting	Yes
Empty folders	Yes
Change notifications	Yes
Uploads of unknown size	No
Public links	Yes

Setup notes

In CloudMount you add this drive from the Add drive screen, and the wizard asks for the options listed under Options. The notes below come from rclone’s setup guide.

Modification times and hashes

pCloud allows modification times to be set on objects accurate to 1 second. These will be used to detect whether objects need syncing or not. In order to set a Modification time pCloud requires the object be re-uploaded.

pCloud supports MD5 and SHA1 hashes in the US region, and SHA1 and SHA256 hashes in the EU region, so you can use the --checksum flag.

Restricted filename characters

In addition to the default restricted characters set the following characters are also replaced:

Character	Value	Replacement
\	0x5C	＼

Invalid UTF-8 bytes will also be replaced, as they can’t be used in JSON strings.

Deleting files

Deleted files will be moved to the trash. Your subscription level will determine how long items stay in the trash. rclone cleanup can be used to empty the trash.

Emptying the trash

Due to an API limitation, the rclone cleanup command will only work if you set your username and password in the advanced options for this backend. Since we generally want to avoid storing user passwords in the rclone config file, we advise you to only set this up if you need the rclone cleanup command to work.

Root folder ID

You can set the root_folder_id for rclone. This is the directory (identified by its Folder ID) that rclone considers to be the root of your pCloud drive.

Normally you will leave this blank and rclone will determine the correct root to use itself.

However you can set this to restrict rclone to a specific folder hierarchy.

In order to do this you will have to find the Folder ID of the directory you wish rclone to display. This can be accomplished by executing the rclone lsf command using a basic configuration setup that does not include the root_folder_id parameter.

The command will enumerate available directories, allowing you to locate the appropriate Folder ID for subsequent use.

Example:

$ rclone lsf --dirs-only -Fip --csv TestPcloud:
dxxxxxxxx2,My Music/
dxxxxxxxx3,My Pictures/
dxxxxxxxx4,My Videos/

So if the folder you want rclone to use your is “My Music/”, then use the returned id from rclone lsf command (ex. dxxxxxxxx2) as the root_folder_id variable value in the config file.

Change notifications and mounts

The pCloud backend supports real‑time updates for rclone mounts via change notifications. rclone uses pCloud’s diff long‑polling API to detect changes and will automatically refresh directory listings in the mounted filesystem when changes occur.

Notes and behavior:

Works automatically when using rclone mount and requires no additional configuration.
Notifications are directory‑scoped: when rclone detects a change, it refreshes the affected directory so new/removed/renamed files become visible promptly.
Updates are near real‑time. The backend uses a long‑poll with short fallback polling intervals, so you should see changes appear quickly without manual refreshes.

If you want to debug or verify notifications, you can use the helper command:

rclone test changenotify remote:

This will log incoming change notifications for the given remote.

Options

Standard options

The wizard asks for these when you add the drive.

client_id

OAuth Client Id.

Leave blank normally.

Type: string

client_secret

OAuth Client Secret.

Leave blank normally.

Type: string

Advanced options

The wizard shows these under Advanced options. Most drives work without changing any of them.

token

OAuth Access Token as a JSON blob.

Type: string

auth_url

Auth server URL.

Leave blank to use the provider defaults.

Type: string

token_url

Token server url.

Leave blank to use the provider defaults.

Type: string

client_credentials

Use client credentials OAuth flow.

This will use the OAUTH2 client Credentials Flow as described in RFC 6749.

Note that this option is NOT supported by all backends.

Type: bool · Default: false

encoding

The encoding for the backend.

See the encoding section in the overview for more info.

Type: Encoding · Default: Slash,BackSlash,Del,Ctl,InvalidUtf8,Dot

root_folder_id

Fill in for rclone to use a non root folder as its starting point.

Type: string · Default: d0

hostname

Hostname to connect to.

This is normally set when rclone initially does the oauth connection, however you will need to set it by hand if you are using remote config with rclone authorize.

Type: string · Default: api.pcloud.com

Choices:

api.pcloud.com: Original/US region
eapi.pcloud.com: EU region

username

Your pcloud username.

This is only required when you want to use the cleanup command. Due to a bug in the pcloud API the required API does not support OAuth authentication so we have to rely on user password authentication for it.

Type: string

password

Your pcloud password.

NB Input to this must be obscured - see rclone obscure.

Type: string

description

Description of the remote.

Type: string