Rclone copy from Google Drive to Google Drive

Because you’re copying Google Drive to Google Drive with rclone copy, your home internet speed and your PC’s CPU are much less important than many people assume.

If you’re using server-side copy

If the command looks something like:

rclone copy gdrive1:folder gdrive2:folder

and both remotes are Google Drive, rclone will normally use Google’s server-side copy feature. In that case:

Your 800 Mbps download and 40 Mbps upload are largely irrelevant.

Your Core i9 processor is also not a limiting factor.

The transfer happens mostly inside Google’s infrastructure.

For 70 GB, a server-side copy often completes in:

10–30 minutes in many cases.

Sometimes up to an hour or two if Google throttles requests or there are many small files.

What can slow it down?

Thousands of small files (more API calls).

Google API rate limits.

If the source and destination are in different Google accounts with restrictions.

If rclone cannot use server-side copy and has to download then re-upload.

If server-side copy is NOT being used

Then the bottleneck becomes your 40 Mbps upload speed.

70 GB ≈ 560 gigabits.

At 40 Mbps:

560,000 Mb ÷ 40 Mb/s ≈ 14,000 seconds

That’s about:

3.9 hours under perfect conditions.

More realistically 4–5 hours after overhead.

How do you know which mode is being used?

Run the copy with verbose logging:

rclone copy gdrive1:folder gdrive2:folder -P -vv

If you see messages such as:

Copied (server-side copy)

or references to server-side operations, then Google is doing the work internally and the job should finish relatively quickly.

So, for your situation:

Best case (server-side copy): about 10–60 minutes.

Worst case (data flowing through your connection): roughly 4–5 hours.

Since you’re using a Google Drive client ID, which gives you your own API quota instead of sharing rclone’s default quota, I’d expect the 70 GB transfer to complete closer to the server-side copy timeframe, assuming both Google Drive remotes support it.