Sync Proton Drive on Linux with Rclone

Proton Drive is an encrypted cloud storage solution that includes desktop sync support for Windows & macOS, but with a distinct lack of any support for Linux. That’s not the end of the road though. Using Rclone we can create our own synced folder.

Requirements

A Proton account (this works with the free tier)
A Linux system

Install Rclone

Check your distro package repositories for an up-to-date version of Rclone, or follow the install guide on their website.

Create or locate a directory to sync

Create or locate a directory you wish to sync. In this guide, I’ll use ~/ProtonDrive.

# Create a `ProtonDrive` directory in the home directory of the user
mkdir ~/ProtonDrive

Create a folder in Proton Drive

Sign into Proton Drive and create a folder Computers. Inside that folder, create a subfolder with a unique name referencing your machine (e.g. Desktop).

📂 Proton Drive
│
├── 📂 Computers
│   │
│   └── 🗂️ Desktop
│
└── ...

Creating the sync

Follow Rclone’s Proton Drive configuration guide to set up your remote, using the folder created in the above step.

Mount your remote with rclone mount and begin syncing files. See rclone mount limitations for more info on --vfs-cache-mode full.

rclone mount my_remote:Computers/Desktop ~/ProtonDrive --vfs-cache-mode full

To persist the mount, create a service, or add this to a startup script. In Hyprland, you can add an exec-once to .config/hypr/hyprland.conf.

exec-once=rclone mount my_remote:Computers/Desktop ~/ProtonDrive --vfs-cache-mode full

Linux