If you want to keep the costs down with S3 you use --checksum or --size-only to avoid reading the metadata with HEAD requests. You can also use --fast-list to

If you want to keep the costs down with S3 you use --checksum or --size-only to avoid reading the metadata with HEAD requests. You can also use --fast-list to use less transactions at the cost of memory (basically just GETs to read 1000 objects at a time). You can also do top up syncs using `rclone copy --max-age 24h --no-traverse` for example which won't do listings then do a full `rclone sync` once a week (say) which will delete stuff on the remote which has been deleted locally. There is also the cache backend which does store metadata locally.