Managing files on cloud storage is not exactly rocket science as each cloud storage provider/service usually has its own user-friendly web GUI (some even have desktop GUIs) for this specific reason.

The more cloud storage services/platforms you're dealing with, the more complex the situation can become. That's why Rclone is so popular, and that's also why most well-established Linux distros include it in their official repos.

Rclone is a free, open-source, cross-platform, remarkably versatile command-line app for managing files on cloud storage. In short, its job is to do all "the heavy lifting of communicating with cloud storage."

There are lots of reasons why Rclone is "the norm" for many users who often deal with files stored on multiple cloud platforms. For starters, it's worth mentioning that Rclone is, in fact, based on Rsync. There's a lot to be said about Rsync as well, but let's just say that Rsync is a product that's been around since 1996, and that pretty much speaks for itself.

Besides all the reasons mentioned above, it's also fast, surprisingly secure, has an awesome documentation section, and plays well with most cloud storage products.

In fact, Rclone supports more than 70 cloud storage services including Google (Drive and most products from the same suite), Amazon (S3), Microsoft (OneDrive), MEGA, Dropbox, just to name a few.

Another reason why Rclone is such a successful product is its versatility. With its help, you can backup, restore, and upload data to the cloud (or between cloud storage servers) and mirror cloud data to other cloud services (and locally).

The app uses multi-threaded downloads to local disks (if that's available), synchronization can be either one way or two ways (Bisync feature that keeps two directories in perfect sync), and can mount any local, cloud, and virtual filesystem as a disk on most desktop platforms such as Windows, macOS, and Linux. Rclone also works over SFTP, HTTP, WebDAV, FTP and DLNA.

In terms of security, know that files are always encrypted over all operations (moving, copying, and synchronizing files over the network). This is done with the help of virtual backends (that wrap both local and cloud file systems before applying encryption).

Rclone also preserves timestamps and verifies checksums to ensure file integrity and safety.

Even though I adore Rclone and think that it's brilliant, I will say that Rclone does require a bit of reading. It's definitely an app that has a bit of a learning curve, but nothing to be horrified about, even if you don't have much experience with the command line.

Thankfully, as mentioned before, Rclone's documentation section (Docs) is very good. Also as a plus, even though Rclone is a command-line tool, it can be used over a GUI. More to the point, Rclone has a web GUI that can be used without much effort (just run "rclone rcd --rc-web-gui").

For a full list of supported providers, as well as for a full spec sheet of this app, alongside all of its documentation, feel free to visit the official website or the app's official GitHub repo.