proton drive

Proton Drive Is Hard to Migrate To or From. Blober Makes It Easy.

May 27, 2026

The Privacy-First Cloud Storage That's Hard to Move Files Into

Proton Drive is one of the most privacy-respecting cloud storage services available. End-to-end PGP encryption. Swiss jurisdiction. Open-source clients. Zero-access architecture, so not even Proton can read your files. Over 100 million accounts trust it. If privacy is your priority, Proton Drive is a strong choice.

But there's a catch: Proton built great sync clients, not transfer tools.

Their official apps sync a folder between your device and Proton Drive. That works perfectly when Proton Drive is your only cloud. The moment you need to move files from Google Drive, from Dropbox, from AWS S3, or to Proton Drive from another provider, you're on your own. Download everything locally, then re-upload. For a few gigabytes, that's fine. For 500 GB of photos across three Google accounts, it's a weekend you don't get back.

Where Proton Drive Is Officially Supported

Proton offers native clients on four platforms, plus web access:

Platform	Client	Sync	File Browser	Bulk Transfer From Other Clouds
Windows	✅ Desktop app	✅ Folder sync	✅ Via web	❌
macOS	✅ Desktop app	✅ Folder sync	✅ Via web	❌
iOS	✅ Mobile app	✅ Photo backup	✅ In-app	❌
Android	✅ Mobile app	✅ Photo backup	✅ In-app	❌
Linux	❌ No client	❌	✅ Web only	❌
Web	✅ Browser	❌	✅	❌

Notice the last column. Across every platform, on every client, there is no built-in way to transfer files from another cloud provider into Proton Drive. The official path is: download to your machine, then let the sync client pick it up. That means you need enough free local storage to hold everything in transit.

And if you're on Linux, there is no desktop client at all. You get the web interface, which works but doesn't support drag-and-drop bulk uploads from other services either.

What The Proton Client Does Well (And What It Doesn't)

The Proton Drive clients are well-built for their intended purpose, which is sync, not migration:

What they do well:

Folder sync between your device and Proton Drive
Automatic photo backup on mobile
End-to-end encryption handled transparently
Proton Docs and Sheets integration

What they're not built for:

Moving files between Proton Drive and another cloud
Browsing or selecting files from another cloud as part of a transfer
Repeatable transfer workflows
Linux without a browser

That's the gap Blober fills.

What About rclone?

rclone is the canonical open-source tool for cloud storage. It supports 70+ backends and is genuinely excellent at what it does. Its Proton Drive backend works, with a couple of things worth knowing up front:

Tier 4 (Experimental). rclone classifies its Proton Drive support as Tier 4, meaning it's community-maintained and flagged as "use with care." Known gaps include unsupported modification times, draft conflicts on retries, and stale caching when other clients touch the same files. The underlying Proton-API-Bridge library notes there are "likely quite a few errors."
Password-based auth. To set up rclone with Proton Drive, you provide your Proton email, password, 2FA, and (if applicable) mailbox password through rclone config. These end up in rclone's config file on disk.

If you're already in the rclone ecosystem and these tradeoffs work for you, rclone is a perfectly good fit. Blober is a different style of tool for a different style of user, and the rest of this article is about that.

How Blober Handles Proton Drive Differently

Blober takes a different approach to Proton Drive: instead of asking for your credentials in a config file, it asks Proton for them.

You Just Log In. Normally.

When you connect Proton Drive in Blober, a browser window opens to account.proton.me, which is Proton's own login page. You sign in with your email, password, and 2FA exactly as you would in any browser. Your password never touches Blober. It stays inside the isolated browser session, the same way it does when you log in at drive.proton.me.

What Blober Supports With Proton Drive

Operation	Supported	Details
Browse	✅	Navigate your full folder tree
Download	✅	Parallel, resumable downloads
Upload	✅	Parallel uploads, auto-creates folders
Delete	✅	Moves to Proton Trash (recoverable)
Metadata	✅	Filename, size, created/modified dates
Multiple accounts	✅	Each account gets its own session. Run transfers in parallel

What Blober Does That Proton's Client Can't

Transfer from any supported provider directly to Proton Drive. Google Drive, Dropbox, AWS S3, Azure Blob, Backblaze B2, Cloudflare R2, DigitalOcean Spaces, Wasabi, Rabata, GoPro Cloud, local disk. No intermediate downloads.
Transfer from Proton Drive to any other provider. Moving away from Proton? Moving a subset of files to cold storage on Backblaze? Blober handles it.
Selective file transfer. Browse your source, pick exactly the files you want, transfer only those. Not a full sync of everything.
Saved workflows. Set up "Dropbox to Proton Drive" once, run it whenever you want. The workflow remembers your source path, destination path, filters, and file naming templates.
Works on Linux. Blober runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux. Since Proton doesn't ship a Linux desktop client, Blober is one of the few ways to get a desktop-native Proton Drive experience on Linux without using a browser.
Resumable transfers. If your session expires mid-transfer, Blober prompts you to re-authenticate and picks up where it left off. No files are lost or duplicated.

The Migration Scenario

Here's the situation Blober is built for:

You're on Google Drive or Dropbox. You've decided to move to Proton Drive for privacy. You have 200 GB of documents and photos spread across folders. Today, your options are:

Option A: Manual download and re-upload

Download 200 GB from Google Drive to your local machine (hours, needs free disk space)
Wait for Proton Drive sync client to upload it all (hours more, CPU-intensive due to encryption)
Repeat for Dropbox
Hope nothing failed silently

Option B: Google Takeout + manual upload

Request a Takeout archive (can take days)
Download the archive(s)
Extract, organize, upload to Proton Drive
Storage used: 3× (source cloud + local archive + Proton)

Option C: rclone

Run rclone config to set up your Google/Dropbox and Proton remotes
Provide your Proton credentials when prompted
Run rclone copy gdrive: protondrive: with the flags that fit your scenario
Drive everything from the CLI, including monitoring and restart

Option D: Blober

Sign in to Google Drive (OAuth) or Dropbox (OAuth)
Sign in to Proton Drive (browser login)
Select the files you want
Start the transfer, then come back and re-run the same workflow whenever you need to

Blober vs rclone for Proton Drive: Side by Side

	Blober	rclone
Auth method	Browser login via Proton's own page	Credentials in `rclone config`
Interface	Native desktop GUI	CLI
Modification times	Preserved from source	Not preserved
Resume on failure	Automatic	Manual restart
Linux	Native desktop app	CLI
Cross-provider transfer	Built-in (select source and destination)	`rclone copy source: dest:`
Multiple Proton accounts	Each one its own session	Separate config remotes
Scriptable automation	Workflows, no cron	Cron-friendly CLI
Mount as filesystem	Not supported	Supported (FUSE)

Who This Is For

Blober is a good fit if:

You're migrating into Proton Drive from Google Drive, Dropbox, or another cloud
You're moving out of Proton Drive to another provider, or shifting a subset to cold storage
You're on Linux and want a desktop-native way to manage Proton Drive files
You'd rather log in through a browser than configure credentials in a file
You want a repeatable, named workflow you can re-run later

rclone is a good fit if:

You're already in the rclone ecosystem and want one tool for everything
You need scriptable, cron-based automation
You want to mount Proton Drive as a filesystem (FUSE)
You prefer CLI control over a GUI

Using Proton Drive with Blober

Proton Drive is a genuine privacy-first storage service. End-to-end PGP. Zero-knowledge architecture. Open clients. The trade-off Proton makes for that privacy is that getting files in or out, at scale, isn't a first-class experience.

That's where Blober comes in. You sign in to Proton Drive through Proton's own login page, pick the cloud you're moving from or to (Google Drive, Dropbox, S3, Backblaze B2, R2, Wasabi, GoPro, NAS, or local disk), choose what you want to move, and let it run. No config files, no CLI, no separate sync clients to install. The same workflow runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows.

If you have files in other clouds and you want them in Proton Drive, or files in Proton Drive you want elsewhere: that's what Blober is for.