Rclone supports Proton Drive, you could try using that to download everything with like one command https://rclone.org/protondrive/
this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2025
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Empowering you to choose a better internet where privacy is the default. Protect yourself online with Proton Mail, Proton VPN, Proton Calendar, Proton Drive. Proton Pass and SimpleLogin.
Proton Mail is the world's largest secure email provider. Swiss, end-to-end encrypted, private, and free.
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Proton Calendar is the world's first end-to-end encrypted calendar that allows you to keep your life private.
Proton Drive is a free end-to-end encrypted cloud storage that allows you to securely backup and share your files. It's open source, publicly audited, and Swiss-based.
Proton Pass Proton Pass is a free and open-source password manager which brings a higher level of security with rigorous end-to-end encryption of all data (including usernames, URLs, notes, and more) and email alias support.
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Rclone is great for data wrangling. Takes only a little learning for a lot of future convenience/automation down the line.
Holy shit. I've been ignoring Drive because of the poor sync options. Definitely looking into this. Otherwise its just deadweight on my subscription
If all else fails, try making a GDPR download request. They must legally provide you with a copy of all data they have about you, including your uploaded photos.
Come on, now! They are too busy with their crypto wallet and their ghetto LLM (that is not actually private).
how is the llm not actually private?
How would you make a private LLM other than one that runs on your local GPU?
You have to send their servers a plaintext prompt for a cloud LLM to work, there is no way around it.
With no logs kept and every chat encrypted, Lumo keeps your conversations confidential and your data fully under your control — never shared, sold, or stolen.
it sounds like they are saying they don’t use your data and encrypt it so only you can read it, i assume the same as they do with protonmail?
But how would that work with a cloud LLM? The prompt be can't encrypted, they have to read it in plaintext. They don't need to read your email contents to make the process of sending an email work.
They can subsequently encrypt it "at rest", e.g. for the duration of the LLM session or for some hours or whatever, but they would have to have access to prompt/output data to make the LLM work. It's not like email.
i don’t think they’re saying that the processing of your llm query is encrypted, just storage of the chat and the lack of your input data being used for further training or sharing (this is quite important to businesses who don’t want their data to leak)
But then you're back to square one. You rely on trust in Proton (which is fine); but it's not really private (in the dictionary sense of the word).
And if you have to rely on Proton, you're in the same situation as with OpenAI/Google/Mistral etc (I am speculating, but I highly doubt an enterprise subscription to say Google Gemini allows Google to leverage the prompt/output data).
Although there is actually one important caveat to the above-mentioned point; the quality of Proton's LLM output is noticeably worse than with say Gemini (I only did some basic work-related prompt tests, but it was significantly worse than Gemini, ChatGPT and Mistral - LLMs that I cross test relatively regularly).
For the vast majority of use cases about anything, we rely on a firm and we don't have an option but to trust it to one extend or another. Very few things out there can operate with E2E which isolates us from this trust. This is something often missed by peope in the tech circles, as well as the corrollary that it's the firm that needs to be improved and not the technology, because often there is no practical technological solution. In this regard Proton being a non-profit is on a different level compared to the publicly-traded profit-maximizing multinationals like Google etc. I'm not saying one has to have complete trust in Proton. Instead that one is in a very different boat using a Proton product compared to a Google product.
And if you have to rely on Proton, you’re in the same situation as with OpenAI/Google/Mistral etc (I am speculating, but I highly doubt an enterprise subscription to say Google Gemini allows Google to leverage the prompt/output data).
yeah to me it looks like just a consumer targeted version of enterprise versions of gemini/chatgpt etc
openai looks to have a simple option to turn off using your data to train so the only truly unique thing appears to be encrypted storage of the chats
the quality of Proton’s LLM output is noticeably worse than with say Gemini
yeah they got a long way to go, im still using mistral and claude mainly
I have never been so disappointed in a company. I’m going to close this account after I’m done downloading and I’ll transfer my email to Tuta.
Just a question: cannot this be a problem on your side of the connection ?
I recently had a problem with win11 (connected via Android with hotspot) where I was able navigate the web all I want but if I tried to download something big (let's say a couple of GB) the connection was reset after a while. In my case the solution was to use another android phone as hotspot, but I would try to investigate if you are able to download something big from somewhere else, if not I would think the problem is your connection
I think I kind of located the problem. The reason it kept failing on Safari was probably an Apple thing (I am even so more done with Apple than anything else). I assume Safari kept sleeping the tabs because it assumed no activity. It didn't keep them open in memory. Therefore all downloads failed. I am now doing the last part, which is 60GB of photo's of my Asia travel. I forgot to look at my Mac, it locked itself and after 30GB the download failed again (in Firefox). I assume Firefox doesn't reload tabs automatically so the larger files keep going.
However, I still think Proton should make it easier for us to export media. This seems no different than the walled Apple garden. Once you go in, you can get out very difficult.
However, I still think Proton should make it easier for us to export media. This seems no different than the walled Apple garden. Once you go in, you can get out very difficult.
You could be right, but exporting the data is a simple download. Maybe a button "Download all my files" could be usefull.
Exactly! The support team did acknowledge that there are known issues if you download 500 items at once. I had these issues even at 300 files. Only with batches of 100 it worked well. They really need to figure this out. Proton Drive is their worst product.
If you are right and the connection is closed by your browser because OS put it in backgroud (or suspend it) I think that Proton, or anyone else, can do little to nothing on their side.
Damn. I remember encountering the exact same issues in Google Photos a year or two ago (so I doubt anything changed). Good to know!
So, you made the files on Proton Drive your only copy?
Have you tried downloading with a browser?
I’m currently using Firefox to download them, and am at 100 items per time. It seems to be working better than Safari.
Yeah it is my only copy. Anything from 2025 is also on my phone, so I can just neglect those. But the 2024 media isn’t. And this really isn’t a “backup problem” it’s a restoring/export problem which is just a service or feature problem.
My photos are there, they are safe. But Proton is restricting me into downloading them, by not providing the correct tools.
Glad it's working, not the way it should, but still working.
Yeah! I’m very happy. I had a double or triple backup of everything, besides the month November. It was my nieces birthday and I traveled through Asia, so those were important media to me. I’m very happy after 20 painful hours that I got them back. As a precaution I ordered another SSD to clone the first one.
Oh I’d say it’s a “backup problem” too. As in you didn’t follow good backup practices for something you care about. You should have had another copy so you could just nuke Proton Drive and move on. What would you have done if they lost your files due to no fault of your own?
I agree, first storage location should be on a medium you control and own and have access to .... an SSD, an HDD, even DVD or tape drive.
Then load a secondary copy onto cloud service. Then if you want to be extra safe, a third physical copy on a HDD that you store physically somewhere else (and do monthly or bi monthly backups to it periodically) .... somewhere else like a friend's house, grandma's house or a bankers box.
Ask me why I recommend this .... ever since the start of digital photography I love taking lots of photos and at the start I stored things wherever I could. Then I started organizing and creating a huge storage solution ..... on one drive, I thought I was so smart.
The drive failed on me and I lost about three years worth of photos .... about 5,000 original images. Yes I tried recovery but the old drive I used at the time had failed so many times that eventually it was lost with everything in it. Its the same feeling as watching your house burn.
That was about 15 years ago.
I now maintain triple physical backups (two on site and one off site) with one cloud storage solution.
Linux Drive app ;_;;
I do like the VPN, but the drive and the email turned out to be untenable for me.
The upload/download options are just too limited and often require weird workarounds. The pricing and constant upselling, along with the opaque process for downgrading are all a little off-putting. It's no different from what other companies do, but I guess that's the point.
I found during mass uploads there was a limit to file handlers ( I was uploading decades of photos ). I don't know if it was proton or the browser that just couldn't handle the amount of files, so I had to break it up into sections and upload X folders the Y folders etc, maybe downloading has the same issues
Based on your post I tried with 3 different browsers, on a wired and wireless connection (I have great internet speeds). But it’s all the same result. I assume it’s a Proton limitation.
Thanks for the follow up, this saves me(and others) a lot of effort of testing, should we need to pull down the data one day.
Proton's customer support is horrendous. It just couldn't be more clear that they're hiring a bunch of idiots to read your emails, ignore what you're saying, and reply with some sort of canned response. They don't have any capacity beyond that. But that's unfortunately just PAR for the course these days.
Why is it people think backing up your files means just sending them to another single point of failure? This is no better than keeping them on your own drive, you just added more steps and made it harder on yourself, and paid someone else for the privilege.
I disagree. It's not like they are safekeeping it for free. I am paying them and I expect basic features like uploading, downloading and managing. Of course their servers can be compromised by whatever reason, but that's not the case here. It's only 100Gb worth of data. In the grand scheme of data that people store online, it's a tiny grain of sand in the big data desert. It should not be this difficult (by design) to extract 100GB worth of media from a professional company. Especially, if other providers are able to do it.
I am paying them and I expect
Yeah, well backing up files is so you can be prepared for what you don't expect.