Using Amazon Cloud Drive with Plex Media Server on Ubuntu… And Encrypting It!

UPDATED – 26 January, 2017

This guide previously made use of acd_cli for mounting Amazon Cloud Drive. It’s been updated to use rClone for both mounting and uploading, as this is not only more efficient, but also much more robust. Using rClone for mounting eliminates the need to sync/remount your ACD mount.

If you’ve already used this guide, you can simply head over to the automatic mounting script guide, update your script with the changes in the guide, and execute it, you should be good to go!

The idea of an “unlimited” Plex server is an exciting one, but there are some bases you’ll want to cover before dumping all your media into the cloud. The biggest issue with keeping your media hosted in the cloud is encryption; you don’t want any storage providers snooping around your files, regardless of their source or content. This guide will get you going, with a focus on security.

Also, with the announcement of Plex’s new “Plex Cloud” offering, I’ve seen quite a few people posting on Reddit’s Plex subreddit for help with using Amazon Cloud Drive (ACD) as a storage provider for their Plex media on their standalone Plex server. There have been some guides floating around the Internet, but some of these guides use a confusing approach (in my opinion) to accomplish a task that’s already a bit confusing for some. I’ve been using the setup detailed in this guide for a few years now, even with multiple servers utilizing the same ACD mount, and I’ve had very few issues. I’ve automated this setup with tools like CouchPotato, Sonarr, and custom scripts in conjunction with Plex Requests to the point where I rarely have to do any maintenance on my Plex servers, and anybody can request media and have it available in minutes without any kind of interaction from me.

If you haven’t set up Plex yet, or you’ve got a fresh installation of Ubuntu, you can use my other guide, Getting Started with Plex to get the prerequisite setup finished first.

In this guide, we’ll be making use of several different projects to get this setup working smoothly, so while a guide can help you get set up, troubleshooting any problems can be difficult and a guide won’t always be helpful. However, if everything is set up in a logical way to begin with, the pain of troubleshooting can eased. Let’s get started on that now!

What you’ll need:

• Amazon Cloud Drive account (obviously)
• User account running these tools and Plex (preferably named “Plex”)
• unzip
• Python 3 (installed by default on Ubuntu 14.04+)

What we’ll be installing:

• rclone
• EncFS
• UnionFS-Fuse

How it Will Work:

Basically, we will be using rClone both to read our Amazon Cloud Drive and to write to back ACD, and EncFS to encrypt it all. The real magic happens with UnionFS, as it will merge our read and write directories into one, so we can essentially forget about those other directories and focus on a single path for all our needs, including other tools like CouchPotato and Sonarr.

I’m going to assume your user account running Plex is not root, and is called “Plex” for the sake of convenience. Substitute usernames as necessary here, and stay logged in as this user throughout the guide. We’ll use “sudo” for anything requiring elevated privileges.

Anytime “~” is specified in a directory, it is assumed to be equal to ‘/home/plex’

Step 1 – Creating Necessary Directories

Let’s create the directories we’ll be using to make all this work. For ease of use, I like to put these directories right inside my Plex user’s home directory. So let’s make sure we’re at the right place (again, you should be logged in as your Plex user, not root):

cd ~

Now that we’re in the home directory, let’s create the five directories we’ll be using:

mkdir .acd
mkdir acd
mkdir .local
mkdir local
mkdir media

These directories will be used as follows:

~/.acd – ACD mount containing encrypted media
~/acd – ACD mount decrypted with EncFS
~/.local – local media after being encrypted by EncFS
~/local – where your local/downlaoded media will be copied to
~/media – the UnionFS mount point which will merge ‘~/acd’ and ‘~/local’ directories

Step 2 – Setting up rClone

Install rclone

Start off by making sure you’re in your Downloads directory, then grabbing the rclone package:

cd ~/Downloads
wget http://downloads.rclone.org/rclone-current-linux-amd64.zip

Now, unzip the archive and change directories to it:

unzip rclone-current-linux-amd64.zip
cd rclone-*-linux-amd64

Copy the binary and give root ownership:

sudo cp rclone /usr/sbin/
sudo chown root:root /usr/sbin/rclone
sudo chmod 755 /usr/sbin/rclone

Then install the manpage so you can read all about rclone:

sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/share/man/man1
sudo cp rclone.1 /usr/local/share/man/man1/
sudo mandb

Set Up rclone

Now we’re ready to configure rclone. Once again, this process is different depending on whether you’re using a desktop session or a headless SSH session. If you’re using a terminal in a desktop session (GUI), then simply enter the commands below, otherwise scroll down a tad further to “Using SSH or a headless server”

Using a desktop interface/GUI

In your terminal, simply type the following command to enter the rclone configuration process:

rclone config

This will guide you through a fairly easy process. Let’s go through the steps together:

• Press “n” to add a new remote connection, then “enter” to proceed
• You’ll want to name your instance something simple, like “acd” to make it easier to upload files
• Press “1” for ACD, then “enter” to proceed
• Press “enter” for the next two fields to use defaults
• Press “y” to use the “automatic” mode, which will open a browser window. Enter your ACD credentials, and log in. The config process should continue automatically.
• Press “y” if you can see your token text on the screen
• Press “q” to exit the config process, we’re done for now

Using SSH or a headless server

If you’re managing a headless Plex server, or you don’t have a desktop environment installed, authenticating rClone gets a bit trickier. I’ve found success using the w3m browser. So lets install that:

sudo apt-get install -y w3m

This will install a text-only terminal-based browser. It should do fine for this purpose, but don’t plan on surfing the web with it.

Now we’ll install a utility called Screen (this is included in later versions of Ubuntu). Screen allows you to have multiple terminal sessions open without worrying about them expiring or closing out. This is useful if you need to access your server remotely with Putty or something similar to execute a script or other process, but can’t have the SSH session open until that script/process is complete. Ending your SSH session also ends whatever script/process you were running. Screen is a great way to prevent that from happening, and lets you reconnect to existing sessions from any other SSH session. So let’s install Screen:

sudo apt-get install -y screen

Sometimes Screen is already installed, but either way it should be now for sure. To open a new terminal session with Screen, just type:

screen

Press “enter” to dismiss the message, and now you’re in a second terminal session. You can exit a Screen session while leaving it active at anytime by pressing “CTRL+A” then “D” to disconnect. Now that we have a second session running, let’s start the rclone config process:

rclone config

Move past these steps the same as the GUI users would have, up to the “use auto-config” step:

• Press “n” to add a new remote connection, then “enter” to proceed
• You’ll want to name your instance something simple, like “acd” to make it easier to upload files
• Press “1” for ACD, then “enter” to proceed
• Press “enter” for the next two fields to use defaults
• PAUSE at the auto-config step. Pressing “y” to use the “automatic” mode will attempt to open a browser window. This won’t work, however it will show you a URL to use. Copy this URL, then disconnect this Screen session by pressing “CTRL+A” then “D” which will keep that session active in the background
• Open the w3m browser to the rclone URL by entering:

w3m http://127.0.0.1:53682/auth

• Enter your ACD credentials by moving your cursor to the required fields, pressing “enter” and typing your username/password, then pressing “enter” again
• Place your cursor on “Sign in using our secure server” and press “enter” to sign in. You should see a “success” message
• Press “q” to exit the w3m browser
• Type the following command to reconnect to your previous Screen session:

screen -r

• Press “y” if you can see your token text on the screen
• Press “q” to exit the config process, we’re done for now
• Press “CTRL+A” then “K” to permanently kill this Screen session

Just to make sure everything worked correctly, we can run the following command to list the remote accounts configured with rClone, and it should list “acd” under the “Name” heading and “amazon cloud drive” under the “Type” heading:

rclone listremotes

Mounting ACD with rClone

Now we’re ready to mount our Amazon Cloud Drive instance to make it accessible to the server. This is accomplished with one simple command, however you can automate this process (and the rest of this guide) using the scripts over at our other guide here! The command to mount ACD is as follows (don’t forget the ampersand at the end!):

rclone mount acd:Plex /home/plex/.acd &

This will mount your ACD instance in the ‘.acd’ directory in the plex user’s home directory. The ampersand executes the command in the background so we can continue using our terminal. Now we can move on to the encryption phase!

Step 3 – Setting up EncFS

Install EncFS

Now that we have our ACD instance mounted using rClone, let’s make sure it’s encrypted:

sudo apt-get install -y encfs

Set Up and Test Encryption

Then we’ll go ahead and get our directories encrypted. Using EncFS, the first directory in the command is the one you’ll want encrypted, and the second directory is the one you want decrypted. The nice thing about EncFS is you don’t really have to specify the action, if the first directory already contains encrypted files, the second directory will automatically decrypt them. So let’s encrypt our local media directories:

encfs /home/plex/.local /home/plex/local

You should see a prompt from EncFS regarding encryption settings. Use the default and just press “enter” to move on to password creation. Make sure you remember this password! Type it a second time, and your local directories are now encrypted. You can test this by creating the directories Plex will use in the ‘/home/plex/local’ directory. In this guide, we’ll only worry about movies and TV shows, so let’s create a directory for each:

cd ~/local
mkdir Movies
mkdir "TV Shows"

Now let’s list the ‘local’ directory to make sure they’re created:

ls ~/local

And you should see the “movie” and “tv” directories listed. Now, let’s list the encrypted directory:

ls ~/.local

You should see two directories with a bunch of random characters. This confirms our files are being encrypted.

Move Settings File

Now let’s move our EncFS settings file to a more convenient location. First we need to unmount our local media directories. This command is also used to unmount other EncFS directories in the future, though you shouldn’t need to use it very often:

fusermount -u /home/plex/local

Next, we’ll move the “encfs6.xml” file and rename it to something simpler:

mv /home/plex/.local/.encfs6.xml  /home/plex/encfs.xml

Encrypting Directories Using EncFS Configuration Files

This “encfs.xml” file is your encryption “key,” not to be confused with the password. These work in tandem to keep your files secure, so you’ll want to make sure you keep a copy of this file backed up somewhere safe. Now, when mounting an EncFS directory, you’ll need to specify the location of the config file. Anytime you mount an encrypted directory, the command will always start the same, only the directories will change as needed. Let’s go ahead and mount our local media directory again using the config file:

ENCFS6_CONFIG='/home/plex/encfs.xml' encfs /home/plex/.local /home/plex/local

Okay, now let’s do the same for our ACD directories. Enter the following into your terminal:

ENCFS6_CONFIG='/home/plex/encfs.xml' encfs /home/plex/.acd /home/plex/acd

And that’s it for encryption! It seems like a lot, but underneath it all, everything is pretty simple. Four directories, two of which are encrypted mirrors of the others, and a fifth to merge the two decrypted directories together. Let’s move on to merging those directories with UnionFS!

Step 4 – Merging directories using UnionFS-Fuse

Install UnionFS-Fuse

Once again, let’s get UnionFS-Fuse installed;

sudo apt-get install -y unionfs-fuse

Merge Directories Using UnionFS

There’s no other setup required for this part, we just need to specify which directories we want to merge. Those will be the decrypted directories, local and ACD, so Plex can be refreshed to grab new movies/episodes when they’re downloaded without waiting for them to be uploaded, and so other tools like CouchPotato and Sonarr can move files into this directory and they’ll appear to be in the same location as all the ACD media.

unionfs-fuse -o cow /home/plex/local=RW:/home/plex/acd=RO /home/plex/media/

The “RW” and “RO” arguments in that command specify which directory is writable (local directory) and which is read-only (ACD directory). So now anything you copy/move to ‘/home/plex/media’ will actually be in ‘/home/plex/local’ and thus encrypted in ‘/home/plex/.local’, and anything in your ‘/home/plex/acd’ directory will also show up in the ‘/home/plex/media’ directory. We only need to worry about one directory to point Plex libraries at, or to have CouchPotato/Sonarr monitor. This makes life much, much easier! Now, we’re ready to move on to the final phase of this guide; uploading your downloaded media to ACD.

Step 5 – Adding ACD Directories to Plex

Let’s make sure Plex can see the ACD directories now! Hop over to your Plex web portal, and add a new library (or edit an existing one). When choosing your directory, browse to ‘/home/plex/media’ and you should see the “movie” and “tv” directories we created. Choose the respective directory for your library, and that’s it! Anything you upload to ACD will show up in that directory.

If you don’t see the ‘media’ directory when trying to add it through Plex, it could be a permissions issue. One thing you can try is browsing to the ‘/home/plex/acd’ directory from Plex web and seeing if those directories show up. If they do, this is a permissions issue with the UnionFS mount. Unmount it by typing:

fusermount -u /home/plex/media

And then edit  the fuse configuration file:

sudo nano /etc/fuse.conf

Find the line “#user_allow_other” and remove the “#” by pressing the delete key in front of that line. Save the file by pressing “CTRL+X” and “Y” to overwrite. Then, mount the merged UnionFS-Fuse directory by adding the “allow_other” option to the mount command:

unionfs-fuse -o cow,allow_other /home/plex/local=RW:/home/plex/acd=RO /home/plex/media/

Now, you should be able to see the “movie” and “tv” folders inside ‘/home/plex/media’ directory when adding a library in Plex web.

Step 6 – Uploading to ACD with rclone

Now that our directories are set up and encrypted and we have them added to our Plex server, it’s time to start adding media to them.

Upload Local Files/Directories to ACD Using rclone

The syntax for copying files with rclone is “rclone copy sourcedir remote:destinationdir”. In this context, “sourcedir” is your local encrypted directory, “remote” is what you named your ACD instance when setting up rclone (I suggested acd), and “destinationdir” is the directory in your ACD you want to move those files to, which in our case would be inside the “Plex” folder you created in the ACD web portal.

Anyways, on to the meat and potatoes! To upload your local files over to your ACD mount, we’ll be uploading your encrypted local directory to the encrypted ACD mount with the following command:

rclone copy /home/plex/.local acd:Plex

This should copy the files from your local encrypted directory to your encrypted ACD directory, and then you can manually delete them from ‘home/plex/local’ if the copy was successful.

One thing I like to do is upload my movie and TV directories separately by appending those directory names to the ends of the source and destination directories in the rclone move command. You can just list your ‘/home/plex/.local’ directory to get the names of the directories, and you can figure out which is which by using the “touch” command to place a test file in either directory, then listing the encrypted directories to see which has a file in it. Keep note of those directory names then for future reference, and then you can add them into your “rclone move” command rather than using the “rclone copy” command to have these sub-directories automatically deleted after a successful copy. Here’s what my commands look like to upload with rclone (using my encrypted directory names):

rclone copy /home/plex/.local/BZxQ7QeNh8jos9pEzcKXk5vy/ acd:Plex/BZxQ7QeNh8jos9pEzcKXk5vy
rclone copy /home/plex/.local/L,ULJSSLPjETMTzk5OhzCioC/ acd:Plex/L,ULJSSLPjETMTzk5OhzCioC

And then to empty out my local storage while maintaining those parent directories:

rm -Rf "/home/plex/local/Movies/"*
rm -Rf "/home/plex/local/TV Shows/"*

This will maintain a “Movies” and “TV Shows” directory inside the ‘/home/plex/local’ directory for you.

Step 7 – Use Crontab to Mount rClone, EncFS, and UnionFS Automatically (UPDATE)

I’ve added a new post for handling all your mounts automatically! Check out Automatically Mounting acd_cli, EncFS, and UnionFS Mounts at Boot

Wrap-Up

Well, you made it this far, so hopefully everything is working for you and you’re starting to take advantage of that “unlimited” storage! If this guide garners a decent amount of interest, I’ll write another guide on automating the downloading, renaming, moving, and uploading of all your media using scripts with CouchPotato and Sonarr. You can also fully automate the conversion of your media if you just hate transcoding and want all your media in a universal MP4 format. Leave a comment below if you’d find that useful!

Also, if you’re having any issues, you can either leave a comment below or hit me up on Reddit.

If these guides have been helpful and you’d like to help out with funding my blog, you can make a donation here. It’s greatly appreciated!