Proton Drive: Cloud Storage 4+

Encryption of our data at rest is essential for privacy. Proton Drive has a lot of important potential for the broader security-minded community.

To add a more seamless UX I would recommend the following:

- Allow “sharing” of files, photos, and the Notes App directly to Proton Drive. If I could long press and save a file directly from my browser to Proton Drive, that would offer a more seamless experience.

- Allow uploading all attachments in an email to Proton Drive. This should especially be a feature for ProtonMail.

- Improve ability to bulk upload iCloud Photos to Proton Drive, or even automatically sync. I understand this is a difficult ask.

- Refine the capability of creating whitelisted “groups” to view shared folders. You could add two levels of security by both requiring them to access via their Proton account and then also requiring an admin-set email to read/write.

- Improved “out of Proton” sharing of files and folders. ProtonMail on desktop does this effectively.

- Bulk imports and exports.

- Ability to create “rules” for automatic archiving of documents. If I receive X containing <these words> to my ProtonMail email, then save attachment and email to <this file structure>. I have to catalog a lot of travel receipts for work travel, for example. This would help with that.

Overall, love that Proton Drive is making headway on this important project and I wish the devs continued success down the stretch.

Hi! Thank you very much for taking the time to provide us with your feedback!
We have forwarded it to our Proton Drive team internally, to help prioritize future implementations and improvements to the app. Some of these features are already on our roadmap, as we understand how important they are for our users. Please bear with us and you will find them available in the app next year.

There’s a tradeoff you need to accept when switching from something like Google Drive to Proton Drive. Proton Drive has end-to-end encryption, thus Proton can’t read any of your data. Google Drive, for example, grants Google almost limitless access to read your files. For the privacy-minded, Proton Drive is the obvious choice. But encryption introduces major limits on iOS. Most problematically, you cannot search for files. Not even by file name. There is currently no search at all on the Proton Drive iOS app. This is a major deficiency when comparing the app to competing services. Again, this is currently the tradeoff one has to be willing to make in order to gain privacy, but what a massive tradeoff it is. For those of you who have a lot of files and perhaps aren’t disciplined in your folder structures, you will have a very challenging time locating your files while on your mobile device. I implore the team at Proton to develop a solution to this if you want to pull users away from the competition. Search is a table stakes feature that is inexcusably omitted from the product. I so badly want to permanently move off of Google Drive, but I can’t in good conscience do so until there’s a reasonably good way of locating my files on the go.

Encrypted search on mobile is on our long-term roadmap. It's not a straightforward task because all the file names are encrypted. That's why it is taking us some time to come up with a simple and secure solution. You can still search by file name on our web client (drive.proton.me).

I hear good things on the windows side. But in the iOS / Mac world, ProtonDrive is barely enough to upload files to an app predetermined folder and just leave them there. That is if you can get all your files up in a timely and reliable manner. Email is great, VPN is awesome, drive not so much. And waiting 9 months and not one update, doesn’t help it any. Next update must be huge. Seriously, are there any features coming to Proton drive? Since version 1.10 a whole year ago, all we’re getting is this “The latest version contains bug fixes and performance improvements.” That is one whole year without one single feature added.

Edit to add, finally photo backup. And that is all it is. We now have the ability to very, very slowly, upload our pictures, while the app is open and in the foreground. And on WiFi only.
5k in pictures and tonight will be the 3rd night uploading.
Oh, and you can’t see the pictures on the Mac folder. Let’s not even talk about the Mac app. Syncing for weeks and files still on the SSD instead of just the cloud as advertised.

Thank you for your review! The next update of the app will include the automatic photo backup feature, and our team is actively working towards the release. Please report any issues you've experienced with your uploads to us via the in-app 'Report a bug' feature, so we can look into this further. Note that the app needs to be active in the foreground when uploading files.