rclone/docs/content/protondrive.md

title	description	versionIntroduced
Proton Drive	Rclone docs for Proton Drive	v1.64.0

{{< icon "fa fa-atom-simple" >}} Proton Drive

Proton Drive is an end-to-end encrypted Swiss vault for your files that protects your data.

This is a rclone backend for Proton Drive which supports the file transfer features of Proton Drive using the same client-side encryption.

Due to the fact that Proton Drive doesn't publish its API documentation, this backend is implemented with the best effort by reading the open-sourced client source code and observing the Proton Drive traffic on the browser.

Paths are specified as remote:path

Paths may be as deep as required, e.g. remote:directory/subdirectory.

Configurations

Here is an example of how to make a remote called remote. First run:

 rclone config

This will guide you through an interactive setup process:

No remotes found, make a new one?
n) New remote
s) Set configuration password
q) Quit config
n/s/q> n
name> remote
Type of storage to configure.
Choose a number from below, or type in your own value
[snip]
XX / Proton Drive
   \ "Proton Drive"
[snip]
Storage> protondrive
User name
user> you@protonmail.com
Password.
y) Yes type in my own password
g) Generate random password
n) No leave this optional password blank
y/g/n> y
Enter the password:
password:
Confirm the password:
password:
Option 2fa.
2FA code (if the account requires one)
Enter a value. Press Enter to leave empty.
2fa> 123456
Remote config
--------------------
[remote]
type = protondrive
user = you@protonmail.com
pass = *** ENCRYPTED ***
--------------------
y) Yes this is OK
e) Edit this remote
d) Delete this remote
y/e/d> y

NOTE: The Proton Drive encryption keys need to have been already generated after a regular login via the browser, otherwise attempting to use the credentials in rclone will fail.

Once configured you can then use rclone like this,

List directories in top level of your Proton Drive

rclone lsd remote:

List all the files in your Proton Drive

rclone ls remote:

To copy a local directory to an Proton Drive directory called backup

rclone copy /home/source remote:backup

Modified time

Proton Drive Bridge does not support modification times yet.

Restricted filename characters

Invalid UTF-8 bytes will be replaced, also left and right spaces will be removed (code reference)

Duplicated files

Proton Drive can not have two files with exactly the same name and path. If the conflict occurs, depending on the advanced config, the file might or might not be overwritten.

Caching

The cache is currently built for the case when the rclone is the only instance performing operations to the mount point. The event system, which is the proton API system that provides visibility of what has changed on the drive, is yet to be implemented, so updates from other clients won’t be reflected in the cache. Thus, if there are concurrent clients accessing the same mount point, then we might have a problem with caching the stale data.

Limitations

This backend uses the Proton-API-Bridge, which is based on go-proton-api, a fork of the official repo.

There is no official API documentation available from Proton Drive. But, thanks to Proton open sourcing proton-go-api and the web, iOS, and Android client codebases, we don't need to completely reverse engineer the APIs by observing the web client traffic!

proton-go-api provides the basic building blocks of API calls and error handling, such as 429 exponential back-off, but it is pretty much just a barebone interface to the Proton API. For example, the encryption and decryption of the Proton Drive file are not provided in this library.

The Proton-API-Bridge, attempts to bridge the gap, so rclone can be built on top of this quickly. This codebase handles the intricate tasks before and after calling Proton APIs, particularly the complex encryption scheme, allowing developers to implement features for other software on top of this codebase. There are likely quite a few errors in this library, as there isn't official documentation available.