Readers asked whether the client can be trusted with their files. The
threat model in ARCHITECTURE.md is written for contributors, so
docs/SECURITY_MODEL.md summarises it for users: encryption comes from
the SDK and rPGP, sign-in uses SRP, what is stored where and how it is
protected, who can reach the daemon, every network connection, what the
client does not protect against, and how each package is built and
signed. It says that there has been no independent audit.
It is linked from the README, the documentation index and SECURITY.md.
The daemon has kept recursive folder pins for a long time, but the app
offered "Available offline" for files only. The context menu, the
details pane and the selection bar now offer it for folders too, and a
pinned folder carries the offline badge in the browser and the launcher.
A folder pin used to download the whole subtree inside the control
request, so a large folder outlasted the client's 120 s read timeout,
and every pinned file was read into memory before it was cached. The
daemon now records the pin, answers at once and downloads on a
background thread as a job the tray and the app show, stopping when the
folder is unpinned or the daemon stops. Pins of files and folders both
go through fetch_content, which streams to disk and skips fresh blobs.
A folder pin is refused while offline instead of looking kept.
A file kept only because a folder above it is pinned has no pin of its
own, and unpinning it silently did nothing. ListDir now reports
pinned_by_folder; the app shows such an entry as available offline with
the toggle greyed out, and the daemon refuses the unpin with a message
naming the folder. Unpinning a folder no longer evicts files that are
pinned on their own.
Requested on Reddit.
Removing the package left the user service running from the deleted
binary, with ~/ProtonDrive still mounted. A user who then deleted the
folder to clean up had every file in it moved to the Proton Drive trash,
as any delete through the mount is.
The .deb (prerm on remove), the .rpm (%preun on erase) and the Arch
packages (pre_remove) now stop proton-drive.service for every user with
a running user manager, through runuser with that user's
XDG_RUNTIME_DIR, so no systemd-machined is needed. Upgrades are left
alone. Queued writes stay in the state directory for a later install.
The pacman install script lives once in packaging/ and the AUR
directories link it; push.sh copies its content into each AUR
repository. The uninstall guide now warns not to delete the mount point
while the service runs.
Reported on Reddit by a user who restored the files from the trash.
The RPM recommended both gnome-keyring and kwallet unconditionally, and
dnf installs weak dependencies by default, so a GNOME install on Fedora
pulled in KWallet and KDE Frameworks with it. The recommendations are
now rich dependencies: KWallet only with plasma-workspace, GNOME Keyring
only without it, and the AppIndicator extension only with gnome-shell.
RPM does not accept `unless` in a weak dependency, so the keyring uses
the equivalent `(gnome-keyring or plasma-workspace)`.
Reported on Reddit by a Fedora GNOME user.
Every Nix build of main and of each release tag now goes to
proton-drive-linux.cachix.org, so installing the flake downloads the
client instead of compiling it. The flake names the cache in nixConfig
for nix run and nix shell, and the install guide shows the nix.settings
a NixOS system build needs, since it does not read an input's
nixConfig. A fork's pull request has no token and only pulls.
A flake input pinned to vX.Y.Z is the Nix release, so the release
workflow now builds the flake at the tag and checks its version before
the GitHub release is published. The install guide shows how to pin the
input to a release tag, and the release checklist names the files that
carry the version.
A package upgrade replaces the binaries but does not restart the user
service, so the daemon keeps the old release and its bugs until the next
login. On 3.2.0 the reporter of #33 still saw "Couldn't sync Documents:
read .../snapshots/37: Permission denied", which only a daemon older than
3.2.0 can produce: since then the scan leaves an unreadable subfolder out
and only an unreadable sync root fails the pass (B206).
The daemon now reports its release in Status; one from before the field
omits it, which reads as older. When the daemon is older than the
front-end, the tray says "Update not finished - restart Proton Drive" and
offers a restart, the sync card shows "Restart to finish updating" with a
Restart button, and pdfs status and pdfs diagnose print the systemctl
command. A newer daemon is not flagged, since then the front-end is the
stale one.
Refs #33
Every SDK error that was not an API reply was classified as Offline.
Only a transport failure is. An upload on an account without a photo
library fails in the SDK before any request, and the app said "You're
offline" while every other call worked (issue #38).
Classify by variant: Transport is Offline, InvalidOperation is Invalid,
Serialization is Remote, Crypto and KeysLocked are Internal. The daemon
logs a failed photo upload, and the Photos page greys out Upload when
the account has no photo library.
docs/BUGS.md B205.
The CPU spin while offline, the expired session shown as offline, the
lost refresh tokens and the keyring-refused rotation were fixed without
a changelog entry.
Builds the four binaries with rustPlatform.buildRustPackage from
Cargo.lock, installs the desktop entries, icon, user service and
translations as the other packages do, and wraps the binaries with
exiftool and ffmpeg on PATH. The NixOS module installs the package,
pulls proton-drive.service into the graphical session with the
fusermount3 wrapper on its PATH, and enables FUSE and GNOME Keyring.
A Nix workflow builds the flake when its recipe, the lock files or the
code change.
Refs #37
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01EuyxByBpK3fSWtyPkugeHz
A partial write whose base was not in the content cache queued an
incomplete revision, and every write open over it was refused with EIO
until the drain uploaded it. CI's one-client-lan simulation hit this on
seed 1: a create over a file whose partial edit had not drained yet.
The write open now copies the blob and fills its gaps from the remote
base with Core::fill_gaps, as the drain does, and fails only when that
fill fails (B204).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01EuyxByBpK3fSWtyPkugeHz
A rotation the keyring refused was retried and kept in the kernel
keyring, but only the log said so, and a reboot before the keyring took
it still signed the user out.
`Response::Status` carries `tokens_unsaved` while one waits. The tray
says "Sign-in not saved — unlock your keyring" and needs attention, the
app's status says the same, `pdfs status` prints a Keyring line and
`pdfs diagnose` warns. New strings are translated in every catalog
(B61).
A rotation the Secret Service refused lived only in the daemon's
memory, so a crash or SIGKILL before the retry landed lost the only live
refresh token.
Keep it in the kernel keyring as well until it is written. The next
resume, by the daemon or `pdfs unlock`, puts it back in when the stored
blob still holds the refresh token it spent, and writes it; one left
over from an older login is dropped. `kernelkey` now holds named keys,
the passphrases and the unsaved tokens (B61).
`pdfs unlock` resumes the daemon's session and may refresh it. The
daemon then holds a spent refresh token, and since B202 a refusal of it
read as an expired session although the keyring held a live one.
Before calling a refused session expired, compare the keyring with what
this process last stored. When it holds a newer rotation or another
login, end the mount with `MountOutcome::ResumeStored` and mount again
from the keyring. A rotation another process already wrote counts as
this session's, so the daemon keeps writing its later ones (B203).
A failed keyring write after a refresh was only a warning, and the one
live refresh token then lived in memory only (B61). The sink now keeps
the rotation as unsaved and retries it in the background after 1 s, 5 s,
30 s and then every 5 minutes, until it is written or the blob has moved
on. The refusal is logged as an error naming `pdfs login`.
docs/BUGS.md B61.
A refresh token Proton refused, or a deleted or disabled account, was
treated as a lost connection: the mount came up "offline", the probe
retried forever and logged only at debug, and nothing told the user that
only signing in again helps (issue #35).
session_revoked() names those errors. The root fetch, probe, drain,
event poll, event seed and photos root now set session_expired, log one
warning naming `pdfs login`, and stop retrying. Cached files stay
readable and changes stay queued.
Response::Status carries session_expired (serde default false). The
tray shows "Session expired — sign in again" with a Sign In Again…
item that opens the app's sign-in page; the app's status and Sync card
say the same with a button. `pdfs status` and `pdfs diagnose` report it.
New strings are translated in every catalog.
docs/BUGS.md B202.
Proton refresh tokens are single-use. store_tokens replaced the tokens of
whatever blob was stored, so after `pdfs login` restarted the daemon, the
old daemon's shutdown persist wrote its spent tokens into the new
session's blob, and the new daemon failed with InvalidRefreshToken
(issue #35). `pdfs unlock` and the legacy migration had the same shape.
Each session now writes through a TokenSink that only touches a blob
with its session id that still holds the refresh token it last left
there. Shutdown only flushes a rotation the keyring refused. unlock and
migrate_legacy re-read the blob after verifying.
docs/BUGS.md B201.
Offline or paused, a drain worker claims nothing and then slept until the
earliest queued op fell due. Every queued op was already due and nothing
attempted it, so the wait was zero and all 16 workers spun on the queue
for the whole outage (issue #35: 17 min of CPU in 2 min 16 s).
A worker that claims nothing now sleeps the full idle poll; a reconnect
or resume wakes it. earliest_due_at also uses the claim's exclusions, so
an op held behind a claimed op on the same node no longer counts as due.
docs/BUGS.md B200.
Stop Sharing removes the link, invitations and members but cannot delete
the share itself, and Drive keeps listing the empty share until its
backend removes it, minutes later.
The daemon now leaves a share with no member, invitation or link out of
the listing (unless a lookup failed, so a live share is never hidden),
and the app drops stopped items from the page as soon as the requests
succeed instead of waiting for the slow reload.
An unreadable subfolder, such as a container's root-owned cache, failed
every pass of its synced folder, so nothing else in the tree reached
Drive (#33, B196). The scan now leaves such a path out, together with an
entry that vanished mid-scan and a name that is not UTF-8, and the pass
drops everything under it from classification, the wipe guard and the
push pass's deletions. It is never read as deleted and never downloaded
into. An unreadable or absent root still fails the pass. The activity
feed names unreadable paths once each time the set changes.
Two related bugs on the way to online-only:
- The push pass read deletions from the raw baseline, so a synced path
that later became ignored was trashed on Drive (B197).
- The switch evicted everything once the folder was idle, including
ignored paths such as .git/, symlinks, unreadable folders and files
changed after the pass, none of which are on Drive (B198). It now
refuses and names the path.
Closes#33
The verification window now runs in its own process, so the app survives
when WebKit cannot start its sandbox on secureblue, but the CAPTCHA still
could not be solved there (#29). WebKit binds the journal socket with
`--ro-bind-try`, bubblewrap only skips a missing path, not an unreadable
one, and WebKit has no switch to leave the socket out.
Proton Mail Bridge never uses a web view: it opens verify.proton.me in the
system browser and retries with the original challenge token, typed with
the offered methods. Do the same as a fallback.
- core: `browser_verification_url` and `browser_verified` build the page
URL and the retry credential from the challenge
- gui: when the verification window fails, a dialog opens the page in the
browser and continues the sign-in once the user is done
- cli: `pdfs login` handles a CAPTCHA the same way instead of failing
- i18n: translate the new dialog in every catalog
- docs: B195, TROUBLESHOOTING.md, ARCHITECTURE.md, changelog
Fixes#29
A user switching from a Windows PC to Linux had two half answers:
adopting the old device makes this machine back up as it, and restoring
its folders keeps them in the old device's tree. Neither puts the data
under this machine's own device.
Device roots are separate shares on the main volume, so each top-level
folder of the other device can move under this device's root in one
server-side move. Nothing is uploaded again, and the other device stays
registered, without those folders.
- core: `Request::MigrateDevice { uid }` and
`Db::sync_folder_set_share`
- fuse: `Core::migrate_device` moves every folder, suffixes a name
already taken here with the other device's name, keeps going past a
failed folder, and re-points sync folders that already tracked a
moved folder at the new share
- cli: `pdfs devices migrate UID [--yes]` confirms, moves, then runs
the ordinary restore picker
- gui: "Move to This Computer…" on another computer's row, followed by
the restore picker
- i18n: translate the new strings in every catalog
- docs: CLI.md, USER_GUIDE.md, RECOVERY.md, ARCHITECTURE.md, changelog
On secureblue, WebKit cannot start the sandbox for the verification page:
bubblewrap is kept from the journal socket, xdg-dbus-proxy fails, and
WebKit ends its process with g_error. The webview lived in pdfs-app, so
the whole app crashed after the sign-in (#29).
- gui: `pdfs-app --human-verification` shows the page in its own window,
reads the URL on stdin and prints the token on stdout; its logs go to
stderr
- gui: a child that dies or fails without a token ends the sign-in with a
message that the page could not be opened, instead of "cancelled"
- i18n: translate the new message in every catalog
- docs: B195 in the bug ledger, the cause and a one-time workaround in
TROUBLESHOOTING.md, the child process in ARCHITECTURE.md, changelog
On a fresh install only the daemon and the CLI created
~/.local/state/proton-drive-linux. The app starts the tray before the
first sign-in, so the tray failed to bind its single-instance socket and
exited, and the Takeout page could not remember staged archives (#29).
- gui: pdfs-tray and pdfs-app call AppDirs::ensure at start, which also
makes the directories owner-only
- docs: B194 in the bug ledger, changelog entry
Every release sent the fixed `external-drive-linux@0.1.0-alpha`. If Proton
ever retires that version, every release fails sign-in at once and no update
can fix it.
- core: APP_VERSION and USER_AGENT follow CARGO_PKG_VERSION
(`external-drive-linux@<version>-stable`, `proton-drive-linux/<version>`)
- core: `app_version` and `user_agent` in config.json are optional overrides;
the fixed values older releases stored there read as unset and leave the
file on the next save, a hand-set value is kept
- gui: the About dialog shows the release, its debug info the identity
actually sent
- docs: describe the new default and the migration
A two-password account signed in with its login password as the mailbox
password, so the key chain never unlocked and the daemon retried forever.
Login now asks for the mailbox password and checks it against the account
(proton-sdk 0.8 `unlock`), so a typo is a retry. The password is never
stored: the keyring blob keeps the per-key passphrases instead, and for a
two-password account only when the user opts in (`--remember`, or the
"Keep unlocked on this computer" switch). By default they live in the
kernel keyring for the login session and the account is locked after a
reboot until `pdfs unlock` or the app supplies them again.
- core: kernelkey module, Error::Locked / WrongMailboxPassword, unlock,
lock, key_state, ready; blobs written by 3.0.x are migrated on first
start; token refresh updates only the tokens in the stored blob
- cli: `pdfs unlock [--remember]`, `pdfs lock [--forget]`; status and
diagnose report the key state; the daemon waits while locked and is
marked non-dumpable
- gui: mailbox password dialog at sign-in and on open, locked tray state
- po: all catalogs translated
- bump to 3.1.0, depend on proton-sdk and proton-drive-rs 0.8.0
Refs #26.
DEVELOPMENT.md lists the daemon's current modules, asks for the
simulation runs on FUSE, queue and sync changes, and adds how to handle
a bug fix and a user-visible change, including the six pages the wiki
publisher copies. The release checklist moves to TESTING.md.
The ledger ran B193 down to B78, then B1 up to B75, with T1 to T4 in
the middle and a stray top-level heading inside B14. Status lines used a
dozen wordings for the same few states, so finding what is still open
meant reading 6,600 lines.
Add a header: what the numbers promise (permanent, never reused; B76
and B77 were never assigned), the status vocabulary, and how to add an
entry, with a template. Add an index sorted by status, with what is left
for every open or partly fixed entry. Order all entries newest first
under one Entries section, and move the acceptance-runner findings to
their own section. Titles are in sentence case; anchors are unchanged.
Entry text is kept as written, except B89: the file it described,
proton-dev/CLAUDE.md, no longer exists, so it is closed.
The user guide said only writes were queued. Since 3.0.0 creating,
renaming and deleting through the mount return at once too, and changes
Drive refuses become sync issues. Add a section on changes waiting for
Proton Drive: retry, export, discard, and the two cases that land under
another name or place instead of failing.
Troubleshooting covers changes that have not reached other devices yet,
`pdfs sync issues` and the local_first fallback, and names the real
error for symlinks and hard links (EPERM, not EOPNOTSUPP). CONFIGURATION
lists MemoryHigh and the test variables; CLI notes that `sync export`
takes a folder.
ARCHITECTURE.md described the 2.x write path, where namespace changes
waited for Drive and every mount had its own inode space. Rewrite it
around the local tree (lid, inode = lid + 1, local~<lid> stand-ins), the
queue and its 16 drain workers, sync issues, and the remaining split
between the mount and the mirror engine. Drop the pins.json claim; pins
moved into the database at schema v5.
TESTING.md gains the simulation runs and loses the per-case narrative
that --list and BUGS.md already carry. ROADMAP.md takes over the
post-3.0.0 items from the milestone status file.
Remove MILESTONE-3.0.0-STATUS.md (a working log) and UI_UX_PLAN.md (the
2.x design audit). Code comments and CI that cited the untracked
docs/MILESTONE-3.0.0.md now point at TESTING.md, ARCHITECTURE.md and
ROADMAP.md. Threat-model links follow the section to §10.
The confirmation run on 812eb3d (PDFS_SIM_KNOWN=fail, twelve seeds)
passed every profile, so no open bug is tolerated any more: the call,
hang and damage matchers for B125 to B134 go, and any of them now fails
the seed. B126, B128 and B133 were fixed with B138, B162 and B137;
B134 stays open with local_first off only, which the runs do not mount.
nvrl
Claude