Is there a particular requirement to use rclone?
If not, consider trying gdrive, written in Rust, based on a previous version written in Go.
The initial config is a bit annoying because you need to create an "app" in Google Cloud, but it's not difficult.
This is because no third party touches your files, so the app keys are all private to you, thus is more secure.
You never have to fully publish it, because only you will use it.
If you're on Google Workspace, then you use the Internal app type, which is slightly easier.
You download the last release, drop it in your PATH (e.g. ~/.local/bin/), then run:
gdrive account add
This walks you through the app setup process.
Once that's over, cd into your local destination directory, for ease and safety.
You can see what it will access with this:
gdrive files list
To grab everything, and retain folder structure, you iterate only the list of top-level IDs, so you might do something like this:
gdrive files list --max=100 | tail -n +2 | cut -d ' ' -f 1 | while read -r id
do
gdrive files download --recursive "$id"
done
It provides detailed help for all commands with gdrive help, or by prefixing help to the arguments, e.g.:
gdrive help files download
This is a one-way process, which defaults to not overwriting existing files.
Like other tools, it cannot download Sheets, Docs, etc. type files.
You'll see an error like:
Error: Failed to download file: Bad Request: {"error":{"code":403,"errors":[{"domain":"global","location":"alt","locationType":"parameter","message":"Only files with binary content can be downloaded. Use Export with Docs Editors files.","reason":"fileNotDownloadable"}],"message":"Only files with binary content can be downloaded. Use Export with Docs Editors files."}}
See gdrive help files export for offline copies of those.
