Kind of an update from my previous post. The Proton Drive app on Android utterly failed to back up my photos and videos. I’ve now got a glimpse to a possible reason why.
I realized that it was doing fine with photos and small videos but was struggling with large files, so as a temporary measure, I moved all the files bigger than 1GB to a different folder on my phone. I then had to wipe the app’s data and log back in because it was just hanging or looping repeatedly otherwise. After logging back in, it successfully backed up all the remaining files over many hours. At least, I think it did - I’d have to go one by one to find out and I’m really not feeling too confident about it. But if it didn’t get all of them, it got almost all of them.
Then I added back in the files that were between 1GB and 2GB. It managed this fine. The app’s data usage grew to about 4GB at some points but that is fine as it needs to create encrypted copies of the file it’s backing up and it might be doing a few files in parallel. At the end, the data usage went back down to <1GB.
Then I tried to add back the files between 2GB and 5GB. There were four of them: 2.25GB, 2.50GB, 3.86GB, and 4.12GB. Total size: approximately 12.73 GB. After setting the app running, its data usage grew to upwards of 60GB and I had to halt it. As before, there was no way to get the app to behave again after that besides wiping data and logging back in again. The “clear local cache” button in the app’s settings did seemingly nothing. I moved the big files back to the temporary folder.
Next I tried to move the files one at a time, starting from the smallest one. So one 2.25 GB video file. Turns out my phone shows base-10-based file sizes, so it’s actually 2.091 GiB. The app misbehaves a little bit in vague ways that I didn’t quite comprehend and can’t explain, e.g. it got stuck at “3 files remaining” even though I only added 1 file, so I needed to wipe its memory again, but eventually it uploaded the dang file. I don’t remember exactly how much data it used in the process, but the important thing is it worked. And then I looked at the file through the Proton Drive web interface and checked its details, where I saw what’s in the picture:
Size: 2.09 GB
Original size: -2049486257 bytes
The original file size is stored as a 32-bit signed integer! Is this only in the web frontend, or is it also like that behind the scenes? What happens when the file size exceeds 4GiB? Does this only affect photos/videos or does it happens for the general-purpose Drive as well? Is this why big files have been failing for me?
I’ll keep you guys updated… And I hope these bugs are fixed. I still believe in Proton.
Edit: the four files, added one by one, uploaded successfully. Now moving on to a 6.10GB file. This is bigger in bytes than 32 bits can represent. Wish me luck.
Edit next day: the 6.10 GB file failed to upload. It’s perpetually stuck at “1 item left” after giving it more than enough time overnight. The app is also taking up some 15GB of space - much more than it should. While uploading previous files, it gree to marginally larger than the file being uploaded. Now it’s well over 2x that. So my conclusion is that Proton Drive for Android can’t back up videos larger than 4GB, and fails catastrophically when attempting to do so.
I’m already in contact with Proton support. I’m not sure I’ve quit convinced them of the severity of this bug yet (or multiple bugs) but they acknowledged that there are issues and suggested that the current beta version 2.4.0 of the app has mitigations regarding storage usage, and they gave me instructions for trying to access it.
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Just added an update at the bottom of my post. The 6.10GB file doesn’t go through at all.
I just manually add my photos and videos to my proton
I want them automatically backed up, that’s a huge point of appeal for me.
In fact I’d prefer it if I could also pick other folders on my phone - specifically call recordings - to be automatically backed up too. But that’s not related.
I wish I could manually add photos to the backup from my phone. Sometimes I get pictures I want to save to my backup. Then I need to upload them to my drive and add them to the backup on my laptop/desktop.
I guess I could upload it in the browser as well? It’d be nice if I could do it through the all rather than go through the browser.
If you don’t want all your camera photos backed up, I think you can select a different album (or multiple albums) to be backed up instead. Albums are just subfolders of the DCIM folders.
If you do that, you can back up specific photos by moving/copying them to the album that gets backed up.
I never tried it though so perhaps it’s not as straightforward.
By the way, regarding the issues of this post, I’m in contact with Proton support. They haven’t been able to replicate the issue but they sent me a version of the app that can save debug logs. When I get anything conclusive I’ll post an update.
I looked over the settings button entirely. It’s currently on my camera roll only ( which is what i want ).
I’ve added the “downloads” folder now. Will try it out to see if I download a picture/clip from signal and move it to that directory if it’ll auto upload it.
Being able to select custom photos/movies directly from the app would still be a nice feature though.
By the way they have a feedback system https://protonmail.uservoice.com/forums/932839-proton-drive
If all your camera photos and videos are getting backed up anyway, which other photos/movies would you manually select to back up?
Photos and videos my gf/in-laws send over signal for example. 90% is covered by my own camera. But family sending photos are another I’d like to keep a backup of :).
I want them automatically backed up, that’s a huge point of appeal for me.
I understand, I guess my point was that the automatic backup isn’t actually doing anything on my phone either.
I remember having issues before and I had to upload via the desktop website on my computer. If it’s still an issue make sure you log a ticket with drive through the app.
