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 folders.

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 to sync to. In this example, I’ll create a folder specifically for my desktop sync.

📂 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.

Sync your folder with rclone sync specifying first the local directory, then the remote. Use --dry-run when first using the command to ensure the directories are specified correctly, and you don’t delete anything accidentally.

rclone sync ~/ProtonDrive my_remote:Computers/Desktop

This command will sync your directories when run, but it’s up to you to set up a service to automate running this command. There’s a few options for this, such as a cron daemon or a systemd timer.

Mounting a directory

You can also instead choose mount your remote directory with rclone mount. See rclone mount limitations for more info on --vfs-cache-mode full.

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

To automatically mount after each system restart, create a service, or add this command to a startup script. For example, 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