Problems with Rclone Google (Team) Drives backend

Hi folks, having some trouble with google team drives (via rclone backend). The error write up I tried on rclone forum (see below on adapted writeup). It was not so productive since not launching rclone directly and so hard to get logging info. Wondering if perhaps here can help.

As a start, I searched on rclone forum and saw some historical threads about rate limiting. That solved some folks problems when launching rclone directly. Not sure how to have that working in my restic setup; is there a way to pass command line parameters to a rclone backend?

What is the problem you are having?

Using rclone to access Google Team Drives as a backend for a Restic backup is broken.

What is your version

restic 0.9.6 compiled with go1.13.4 on linux/amd64

rclone v1.52.0

  • os/arch: linux/amd64
  • go version: go1.14.3

Which OS you are using and how many bits (eg Windows 7, 64 bit)

Ubuntu 18.04

The command you were trying to run

restic -r rclone:google:Restic backup--verbose backup /mnt/z/UserData
restic -r rclone:google:Restic snapshots

Interestingly the latter is a ‘view’ operation yet the errors relate to file removals.

Note that the same operations using onedrive as backend works so should be something to do with the way restic is using rclone google team drives handler.

The rclone config contents with secrets removed.

[google]
type = drive
client_id = [[READACTED]]
client_secret = [READACTED]]
scope = drive
token = {"access_token":"[READACTED]]","token_type":"Bearer","refresh_token":"[READACTED]]","expiry":"2020-06-16T17:01:10.8986908+08:00"}
team_drive = [READACTED]]

A log from the command with the -vv flag

Error messages below appear in in STDERR

rclone: 2020/06/16 16:37:51 ERROR : locks/[[FILENAME]]: Delete request remove error: googleapi: Error 403: The user does not have sufficient permissions for this file., insufficientFilePermissions
Remove(<lock/84bf5e225b>) returned error, retrying after 720.254544ms: blob not removed, server response: 500 Internal Server Error (500)

rclone: 2020/06/16 16:37:55 ERROR : locks/[[FILENAME]]: Delete request remove error: googleapi: Error 403: The user does not have sufficient permissions for this file., insufficientFilePermissions
Remove(<lock/84bf5e225b>) returned error, retrying after 873.42004ms: blob not removed, server respons e: 500 Internal Server Error (500)

rclone: 2020/06/16 16:37:57 ERROR : locks/[[FILENAME]]: Delete request remove error: googleapi: Error 403: The user does not have sufficient permissions for this file., insufficientFilePermissions
Remove(<lock/84bf5e225b>) returned error, retrying after 1.054928461s: blob not removed, server response: 500 Internal Server Error (500)

etc etc - the retry timeout tops out at around 15-20s or so and starts again with small timeouts

I had problems with Google Team Drives when I set it up. Not sure if this is going to fix your problem, but what fixed it for me is having

impersonate = email@domain.com

In the rclone config file, where email@domain.com is the email of the person who is authorised to upload files.