The data directory is the whole diary, and until now keeping a copy of it
was someone's manual job. The server can now register itself in Proton
Drive as a device — its own sync root, next to the desktop clients — and
keep that folder equal to DIARY_DATA_DIR, encrypted client-side by the
same Rust SDK the Linux client uses.
One interactive `narl-diary proton-login`, then nothing prompts again.
The stored session carries the tokens, the mailbox password (the key
chain is rebuilt from it on every start) and the account key salts, which
have to be captured at login: `core/v4/keys/salts` needs the `locked`
scope, and only a password-login token has it. Refresh tokens are
single-use, so every rotation is written back before it can be needed.
It lives as a 0600 file next to the database, on the same volume as the
data it protects; `--features keyring` puts it in the OS keyring instead,
for hosts that have a Secret Service.
The mirror is one-way and change-driven: writes mark the diary dirty and
it is mirrored once the writing stops, with an interval as the backstop —
an hour of writing is one backup, not sixty. `diary.db` goes up as a
VACUUM INTO snapshot, so it is a real point in time rather than a file
copied out from under a writer, and as a new revision each time, so
Proton keeps the older ones. Uploads are immutable, so they are written
once and skipped by size afterwards. Deletions do not propagate unless
asked: a backup that forgets on command is one accident away from being
no backup at all.
Identification follows Proton's third-party rules — an honest
`external-drive-narl_diary@<version>-alpha`, the disclosure printed
before any credential is asked for, and remembered folder uids instead of
walking the tree every run.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01D5Gk8FPkRXu1e6Nj2BCRE1
There was no way to get everything out — only one entry at a time, by
hand. A diary you cannot leave is not a diary you can trust.
The archive is entries/ as one markdown file per entry named by its day,
media/ with every embedded file under its real name, and a README. Media
links are rewritten to relative paths, so the entries render in any
markdown reader with no help from this application. Names are restricted
to characters that need no escaping inside a markdown link.
It is built on the blocking pool into a temporary file and streamed, so a
diary with photographs in it never has to fit in memory.
Single-user diary served as one Rust binary with the Svelte frontend
embedded.
- axum 0.8 + SQLite (sqlx), migrations run at startup
- stateless HMAC session cookie; credentials from .env, compared in
constant time
- FTS5 full-text search, user input rewritten into quoted prefix terms
- media uploads linked to entries by scanning bodies for /api/media/<id>,
which scopes share-token media access and entry deletion
- unguessable share links (192-bit token) serving a public read-only page
- vim keybindings via CodeMirror plus a modal browse layer and : command
line; disabled on touch devices
nvrlandClaude Opus 5