What is your current rclone version (output from rclone version)?

1.45

What problem are you are trying to solve?

It could be useful to download or upload files as an archive, without having to first download or upload the files and then create the archive, causing the space usage to be almost doubled potentially.

In other words, rather than downloading the files and then creating a zip or tar.gz archive, then deleting the original downloaded files, it'd be nice to download the files as an archive, so that the files don't use so much extra space on disk just to make the archive.

How do you think rclone should be changed to solve that?

I could imagine a few ways to do it. Rclone could take a folder or archive file on one end, and spit out the opposite on the other end. For example: folder source -> archive destination creates an archive file, and archive source -> folder destination extracts it, regardless of backends being used.

I'm not sure, though, if detecting whether the source or destination is an archive file is trivial.

So maybe a flag? --archive or something.

cf: #675 (comment)

Thanks so much for your work on rclone!