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jerrythegerbil | 3 months ago

As a (previous) customer of Proton from many years and a user of their drive product, you should be aware that earlier this year the drive API endpoints began to block their own VPN egress quite often for rate limiting. They also block many cloud provider’s egress. They also don’t officially support rclone, and their changing API spec often breaks the compatibility.

I saw the writing on the wall and migrated rapidly earlier this year ahead of crypto product launches ahead of the email fiasco. It was hard to get data back out, even then.

Proton still stands for privacy. But the dark patterns for lock-in I can do without.

Hetzner Storage boxes with rclone and the “crypt” option are a drop-in replacement, at ~$40 for 20TB. That’s where I went instead.

discuss

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tachim|3 months ago

As a current (avid) user of Proton VPN and Drive, I have never seen issues with interactions between proton drive and their vpn.

gradschool|3 months ago

I have, and the technical support representative at Proton confirmed it, but not without implying that it was my fault for using rclone. I asked the official recommendation for Linux users to do automated or scriptable backups onto a Proton drive and the answer was that some kind of SDK was planned for the future. Proton drive stopped working completely with rclone shortly after that, which was about two months ago.

hypeatei|3 months ago

I wish Hetzner made storage boxes available in their US regions.

Nextgrid|3 months ago

I wonder if it would ever be possible to reach that value-per-dollar in the current economy.

Hetzner works because it was built a long time ago when talent was cheap, which it was because the property Ponzi wasn't at the stage where an average post-tax middle-class salary barely covers rent. Since then they've managed to stay afloat because it's only maintenance and small incremental changes from that point on.

Building such a new operation (and offering competitive prices) from scratch today would be impossible based on labor costs alone. This is presumably the same reason they don't offer their very-good-value dedicated servers in the US either, only "cloud" VPSes which are orders of magnitude more expensive.

SilverElfin|3 months ago

How can someone not familiar with the technical details use the alternative you suggest? Is there software (even if paid) that can sync to it?

jerrythegerbil|3 months ago

A non technical person would probably Google “Hetzner Storage Box”, click the first link, and read the page that answers all of those questions.

There is many free software suites that Hetzner Storage box supports, up to and including official support for rclone (the free tool used in the post we’re replying to).

https://docs.hetzner.com/storage/storage-box

emmelaich|3 months ago

What was the email fiasco?

hekkle|3 months ago

It's a storm in a teacup.

Effectively there was a proposed Swiss Law that would force Protonmail to cooperate in sharing customer data with authorities if requested.

The law hasn't passed, and it was even deemed illegal by the EU.

It did raise an interesting issue though, as Protomail was strictly in Switzerland, they realised that they were at the whim of their lawmakers (which was kinda the point in the first place as Switzerland has great privacy laws). However, if those laws did become adversarial, it would greatly affect Protonmail users. This is why they started diversifying some services outside of Switzerland, in case something like this ever did come to pass.