Automating Daily Database Backups to Google Drive with Rclone

4/22/2025

Keeping regular backups of your database is essential — but just storing them on the same server isn’t enough when considering the risk of losing backups stored on the same server. In this guide, I’ll walk through how I automated the process of backing up a MongoDB database and securely uploading it to Google Drive using rclone.

We’ll go from local backups to a fully automated, space-efficient offsite backup strategy — all running on a headless Linux server.

🛠️ Step 1: The Local Backup Script

Before uploading anything, we needed a script to generate daily backups from a Docker-based MongoDB database.

The script:

  • Runs mongodump inside the container.
  • Compresses the backup into a .tar.gz.
  • Copies it to a local directory (e.g., /home/Projects/Backups).
  • Deletes any local backups older than 31 days.

This gave us a rolling 31-day local backup — lightweight, efficient and also enough data in case of a data mutation kind of scenario.

☁️ Step 2: Choosing Rclone for Cloud Sync

To get those backups off the server and into the cloud, we chose rclone — a command-line tool that supports syncing to Google Drive.

Why Rclone?

✅ Lightweight & scriptable
✅ Supports Google Drive folder structure
✅ Handles file versioning and cleanup
✅ Easy to schedule with cron
✅ Free and Open-Source

When using Rclone to upload files to Google Drive, you will face certain limits imposed by Google:

  • Daily Upload Limit: You can upload up to 750GB per day per user.

  • Individual File Size Limit: Each file uploaded can be up to 5TB in size, provided you have sufficient storage space in your Google Drive Account

🔐 Step 3: Configuring Rclone with Google Drive

Running rclone config, we created a new remote pointing to Google Drive.

🔒 Tip: Instead of granting full access (drive), use the safer drive.file scope — which only allows access to files created by rclone.

We also specified a root folder ID in Google Drive so rclone uploads would be confined to that specific folder — clean and secure.

⚠️ Common Gotcha: Google Blocks Default OAuth Clients

On our EC2 server, rclone threw this:

Turns out Google blocks rclone’s default OAuth credentials for new users — especially on headless servers.

✅ The Fix:

  1. Create your own Google Cloud project
  2. Enable the Google Drive API
  3. Create your own OAuth client (Desktop App)
  4. Use your client_id and client_secret in rclone config
  5. Add yourself as a Test User under the OAuth consent screen

After that — smooth sailing 🎉

🧭 Step 4: Testing and Verifying Uploads

Once configured, we tested uploads like:

rclone copy /home/Projects/Backups/db-backup-20250415.tar.gz gdrive:Projects --progress

We confirmed uploads using:

rclone lsf gdrive:Projects

If files didn’t show up, we used:

rclone config show gdrive

…to verify the connected Google account.

🔁 Step 5: Automating the Upload

We created a daily script to:

  • Find the latest .tar.gz backup
  • Upload it to the correct Google Drive folder
  • Delete backups older than 7 days from GDrive
#!/bin/bash

LOCAL_BACKUP_DIR="/home/Projects/Backups"
GDRIVE_REMOTE="gdrive:Projects"
LOG_FILE="/home/Projects/Backups/weekly_gdrive_backup.log"

LATEST_BACKUP=$(ls -t "$LOCAL_BACKUP_DIR"/db-backup-*.tar.gz | head -n 1)

if [ -f "$LATEST_BACKUP" ]; then
    echo "[INFO] Uploading $LATEST_BACKUP at $(date)" >> "$LOG_FILE"
    rclone copy "$LATEST_BACKUP" "$GDRIVE_REMOTE" --progress >> "$LOG_FILE" 2>&1

    if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
        echo "[SUCCESS] Upload complete" >> "$LOG_FILE"
    else
        echo "[ERROR] Upload failed" >> "$LOG_FILE"
    fi
else
    echo "[ERROR] No backup file found" >> "$LOG_FILE"
fi

echo "[INFO] Cleaning up old backups..." >> "$LOG_FILE"
rclone delete --min-age 7d "$GDRIVE_REMOTE" >> "$LOG_FILE" 2>&1

if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
    echo "[SUCCESS] Deleted old backups" >> "$LOG_FILE"
else
    echo "[ERROR] Failed to delete old backups" >> "$LOG_FILE"
fi

⏰ Step 6: Scheduling with Cron

We used cron to run the upload every night after the local DB backup completes.

0 2 * * * /bin/bash /home/Projects/Scripts/gdrive_backup.sh

🕒 This runs at 8:30 PM UTC, which is 2:00 AM Sri Lanka Time — just after the daily backup script finishes.

💣 Gotcha: Files Get Deleted Prematurely?

Yes, this actually happened during testing.

Even freshly uploaded files were sometimes deleted when using:

rclone delete --min-age 31d ...

🤯 Why? Google Drive doesn’t always preserve or reflect accurate modification timestamps — especially when uploading via rclone. So, even a new file might be treated as “older than 7 days”.

This will be not an issue when the backing up and exporting has been going on for sometime, the backup created date will be considered when deleting

🔐 Workarounds If you’re running into this issue, here are two safer alternatives:

Option 1: Use —use-server-modtime

rclone copy --use-server-modtime ...

This helps rclone compare server timestamps more accurately.

Option 2: Delete by File Count Instead of File Age Instead of relying on timestamps, delete everything except the latest 7 files:

rclone ls "gdrive:Projects" | sort | head -n -7 | awk '{print $2}' | while read file; do
  rclone deletefile "gdrive:Projects/$file"
done

This keeps your backup history based on filename sorting — much more reliable and predictable.

📦 Final Thoughts

This setup gives you:

✅ Daily database backups stored locally and in Google Drive

✅ A self-cleaning routine that keeps only recent backups

✅ A safe, automated, low-maintenance solution using free tools

It’s perfect for small teams, personal projects, or even production workloads that don’t require large infrastructure.

Thanks for reading! 🙌 I’m Dhaneja, a software engineer living in Japan and building practical tools like this in my spare time.

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