Sync to Proton Drive in the future?

Just FYI possibly for future sync capabilities. The people that make the privacy based Proton Email and Proton VPN have Proton Drive in beta. I contacted them to see if they supported webDAV and they said "... currently, we do not have plans on integrating WebDav. The reason why is because we use a proprietary protocol to maintain end to end encryption, and WebDav does not fit into our current model."

I don't know if they have other ways for syncing data but syncing via Proton may come up as a request in the future.

Due to no WebDAV, I didn't purchase a Proton account at this time.

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Thanks for the information. I was just about to post a question about possible Proton Drive sync, and this answers my question.

jFYI, WebDAV is crap. HTTP was not designed for transferring large files.

What's the status now? Can I sync Joplin with Proton Drive?

You can’t. And it’s a personal opinion, but I think it’s for the better.

Well, where do you back-up your Joplin to? Isn't Proton Drive supposedly one of the most secure mediums to back-up your data (compared to AWS S3 or BackBlaze B2, or even a VPS from a random company).

Well, I actually operate my own Joplin Server on my own server, deployed with Docker and I also back it up that way (with the recommended method of dumping the pgsql data), daily. Those backups (not only Joplin but the other services', as well) are stored georedundantly, naturally.

Any WebDAV-based solution is at fault, and should not be used for any granular data. It's had it's use 20+ years ago but today it should be used only specialized cases (like with CalDAV and CardDAV, it's extensions). If you take a look at the sync-related problems, 8 out of 10 times it boils down to the faulty ways of WebDAV. It's is..nice to have, so to speak, as a sync option, but not a good one, technologically speaking (and it's not Joplin's or Laurent's fault in any way) and people should move away from it when it comes to syncing Joplin.

Just because you asked. :slight_smile:

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I'm not familiar with Proton Drive but from this thread it sounds like it doesn't use WebDAV but its own protocol.
Also of note is that Proton Drive is still in beta so I don't even think it would be worth spending the effort developing it if the protocol could still change (not that I could find much by the way of info about it).

I can not let this stand as it is.
The problems are almost all on the provider side, because they think they have to implement something special and break the standard (Throttling or faulty implementations, ...).
I sync for years about 36000 items via WebDav to 6 devices without problems. The functionality may be more limited compared to the JoplinServer, but not 8 out of 10 problems are WebDav related.

I mostly agree and what I meant is that the problem is how WebDAV is set up on most providers, but I thought it was evident. I've used WebDAV for more than 15 years, still using it for Cal and Card, most providers' implementation is..lacking, so to speak.

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Maybe one reason for people often having issues with WebDAV is that there's more than one implementation - Apache, Nextcloud, etc.
And Nextcloud, for instance, does not even fully implement the protocol (LOCK/UNLOCK methods are missing, for one)

It does use it's own protocol (and it is true for their other products, as well, I'm a subscriber).

So, for Proton Drive, what should they implement to make it easy to integrate with Joplin? S3-like support?

ProtonDrive is not beta anymore. I'd love to see this feature too...

Do they have a developer API? I've not actually been able to find one.

They do not, as of now, as far as I know.

Wrote to their support... Received an answer:


Filip G. (ProtonMail)

Oct 7, 2022, 13:10 GMT+2
Hello,

Thank you for your message.

Unfortunately, we do not offer an API that can be used from the user's side for such operations.

Do not hesitate to contact us if you have any other questions.

Have a nice weekend!

Kind regards,

Filip G.

Customer Support
Proton Mail

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kbfs (Keybase Filesystem) is another option as well, though it does seem to struggle with the occasional lockups and whatnot if you toss lots of data at it at once which requires human intervention. Something to keep an eye on for a future possibility. Their git repo functionality is rock solid though (which also uses kbfs in the background).

Anyway. I use kbfs for all my backups of everything. I have for years. For Joplin, I am pretty darn happy with Joplin Cloud.

-todd

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Well I guess that concludes this conversation for the time being then...

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Keybase Filesystem fangirl here! While it's technically possible to backup Joplin to a local folder (mounted with KBFS), the problem is mostly on the mobile side of things, where Joplin doesn't have an option to write to 'local' folders (at least not on an iOS device, that is).

I wish I understood a bit about how iOS works, because some apps are actually able to write pretty much anywhere on iOS (using the 'More...' file saving option, which will correctly recognise all services properly registered with the operating system) without the need of 'understanding' any of the underlying protocols. On the other hand, apps like Joplin prefer to rely on its own implementation of as many protocols as possible (which are just a handful, at time of writing) without using the internal file-saving facilities.

I have no idea what is required to have an iOS app work in the 'universal' way for saving files. The truth is that even well-established app developers seem to be ignorant that such a functionality exists at all!...