I have a general question about Rclone integration.
Rclone has two modes of working, either cloning/copying between remote and local drives, or mounting a remote directory into the local file system and providing a read and a write cache when accessing the remote drive. This way rclone can speed up the access to the remote.
So my upload speed to my remote is quite slow. When I use the documented Rclone integration into Restic, would Rclone work as as cache for the remote or would Rclone work only as a copy agent for Restic?
Can I just use Rclone mount and accessing the created mound directory as a local repository in Restic?
Restic uses rclone as a proxy (sort of a copy agent). That is restic tells rclone to read/write certain files in the repository and rclone then performs these actions on the remote storage. In this mode, no caching happens on the rclone side. However, restic has its own cache in which frequently accessed files are stored.
The repository layout is the same for a local and for a remote repository. That is, you could copy a remote (rclone) repository to a local folder and it will just work. The same also applies if you use rclone mount and let restic access the corresponding local folder.
But for performance reasons, it is probably better to use the rclone backend of restic, and let restic directly talk to rclone.