🔣 Proton Drive Experience 🙅♀️
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A few months ago, I considered Proton Drive as a replacement for Dropbox. At the time, Dropbox was in the media about using customer data to train their AI models. I wasn't particularly concerned but I figured, I should use a service that supports E2EE which dropbox does not (at least not for personal users).
Despite being a longterm Proton Family subscriber, I predominately use Proton because its rather cheap when the family cost is divided amongst the six of us. My main use case is Proton VPN (its good) and occasionally my @pm.me Proton email address.
Anyway, I gave Proton Drive a real go but from the get go, it was disappointing at best. It took three attempts to transfer 6GB files from Dropbox to Proton Drive. The upload and download speeds was terrible. At this point, I went seeking for answers on Reddit and what I discovered was anecdotes from many Proton users on Proton Drive is just not ready. I should have done my research first.
The following is an experience (extract) just shared two days ago:
Title: My longform experience of moving to Proton's Family plan from Gmail, 1Password & Dropbox -- the good, the bad, and the ugly
Now the bad: Proton Drive This has been a big let down. It is nowhere near a replacement of Dropbox and I only ever used DP for file syncing, not slideshows, passwords, signatures, etc. I wanted to upload circa 500GB and I have had to give up. I installed Drive on my Mac and it started uploading about a gig before doing nothing else, no uploads whatsoever and I checked to see that mds (Spotlight indexing) and Apple's fileupload daemon weren't doing anything on the same files (they weren't). As most of you will know, the app just shows as 'syncing' with no status whatsoever, so I needed to keep referring the web interface to see any progress.
I really wanted Proton Drive to work because I share its values of privacy and it is platform agnostic. Unfortunately, it just cannot be relied upon. Clearly, it requires more time in the oven. For now, I am using it as a backup option which appears to be the way most users are using it (according to their subreddit).
I am rooting for Proton Drive. Come on Proton.
Because of limited resources (compared to big tech), Proton Drive is not getting the attention is so desperately needs.