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this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2023
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@Papanca @synapse1278
I've been testing out the rclone Proton Drive integration for a bit. As it is today, the rclone approach is currently too slow, especially using the "mount" approach which lets you access Drive files on-the-fly only downloading data as needed.
Using an "sync" approach (where data is stored both locally and in Drive) might be a better approach, unless you expect rapid syncing of files.
Considering the setup efforts, I cannot recommend Proton Drive for Linux in a productivity context.
Alternatives to Proton Drive on Linux there is @filen and Tresorit, which are both fully #e2ee. I've been using both for a while and both are decent.
Filen is the cheapest alternative and feature wise pretty close to Proton Drive - but they have a sync client for Linux. They do not have a possibility to access files "on-the-fly"; all data must be synced locally. And sharing data via URL need to happen via the web portal. Sharing data between Filen users was read-only access last time I checked.
Tresorit is fairly expensive, but also a lot more feature rich, especially on the sharing side. The Linux client supports both synchronising files between local storage and the cloud as well as a "drive mount" where all files in the cloud are available and only downloaded once you access it - or uploaded directly if you store something there.
Both Filen and Tresorit are fairly efficient in regards to uploading and downloading data via their sync clients. Using the web portal is slower, especially on larger files. This is naturally and not unexpected; the data is decrypted first on your device when the data has been downloaded from the cloud storage. Proton Drive is no different here.
Filen is a more properly open source based product. Tresorit is non-open source and built on top of Microsoft Azure services.
I'm not familiar with Proton drive but with Google drive you can use a vfs cache if I'm not mistaken to make things faster.
@8rhn6t6s There are some caching which need to be enabled with the protondrive rclone mounting. But it is still slow.
Remember that non-E2EE storages (such as Google Drive, AWS/S3, etc) can do the upload a lot faster as a starting point, as there is no client-side encryption of the data being uploaded (and the reverse; decrypting downloaded data). This decryption/encryption happens in the protondrive "module" in rclone. On top of that comes that files are split up into "chunks" which are transferred via separate HTTP calls. And I have no idea (aka "have not read the code) how the unlock key of the PGP key is handled in rclone. All of these things combined together impacts the performance.
That said, I've had a quick test on a Windows computer with Proton Drive installed. It wasn't blazingly fast there as well, but still felt faster than rclone.
My guess is that it's partly that the rclone implementation has room for improvements on how the Proton Drive server-side APIs are called and some of it is related to crypto implementation performance.
For example, I dunno if the Proton Drive APIs support HTTP/2 protocol or QUIC ... And I dunno if the rclone supports them as well. Just in this aspect there are lots of room to cut down on the "connection handshake" as HTTP/2 and QUIC supports more efficient handshakes and can also have multiple streams sending data in parallel - using a single handshake. If the native Proton Drive app on Windows implements this, that may explain some of the performance differences.
Thank you for taking the time to type all this, much appreciated! I will look into Filen and Tresorit.