A few months ago I installed Proton Drive on my new PC. It started having issues so I sent it back in for repair. I uninstalled Proton Drive then deleted my files for privacy.
Last week I installed Proton Drive again. To my surprise, it scrambled all of my files locally and remote. All my root folders were deleted and my root is now filled with “Delete conflict” files and folders.
I reported this to Proton immediately. After giving them my logs and details support told me…
- This is expected: “Proton Drive is designed to synchronize ALL changes, even after long periods of not syncing”
- No rollback is possible: “Please note that we are unable to revert this behavior. You will have to restore the files manually”
- They plan to address this: “Regardless, we will absolutely be making improvements to avoid such problems in the future.”
For me I have about 100 files to address, which is manageable, but for others I’m sure this would be a showstopper. The delete conflicts don’t have version history either, so I have to figure out how to weave everything back together.
This is also the default behaviour of Syncthing. It must be more of a sync tool than a true backup. In that sense, it makes sense for your files to be deleted when the local copy is gone, but I also don’t think that that’s the expected behaviour for most users.