Blog Inforeseau.com – Alexandre Blanc Cyber Security

Banking, France – Canada transfer, my solutions

This one is not really related to IT and security, but I wanted to share about how I found solutions for my banking challenges.

Lately, I did read a lot about retirement, financial planning, financial freedom etc, and I learned that traditional banks are not our best friends when it comes to finance. Either personal or business accounts, banks cost you money, while they should give you money !

So my first discovery and move this year, was to move to Wealthsimple, and it has been an amazing experience. If you open an account using the link here, or using that code : WGNWUH , you’ll get $25 bonus, and I’ll get it too, assuming you open an account and put CAD $100 on it.

What’s amazing with this platform is that your money, by default, works for you !! When you open a bank account in a traditional bank, they charge you, non stop ! Could be $6 a month, or they charge you for operations and more !

Well, moving to Wealthsimple, you get money even when you do nothing, along as you have money in your account. And they have tons of advantages, including free transactions on tons of thing, stock investing and more, no limit, your money is your money, and that’s a relief.

The more money you have in your accounts, as a household, so are eligible anyone living with you, same address, combine their value, and you reach milestones that give you some great perks ! I enjoy the airports lodges so much, with buffet and all, thanks to them ! And on top of this, your milestone rewards are renewed every year, as long as you keep the value in your account.

Now that you hold your money in an account that works for you, and are able to invest without transaction fees, you may have some money in France, or receive money from France. One of the constraint with Wealthsimple, is that they won’t accept foreign currencies, aside of CAD and USD.

So either you need to send money from France in CAD, but this is usually costly at your bank, with fees and not the best exchange rate. This is where I found « WISE », this platform allows you to open an account, which will handle multiple currencies, with banks transfer in the support of the currency. If you open an account with this link, or clicking on the picture below, you also get CAD $25 and me too : https://wise.com/invite/dic/alexandreb5263

When you open the account, pick your local currency, and select your country of residence, prove your identity, as always with financing solution, and then, in the same account, you go in account details, and add currencies.

This will add supported currencies, and provide you with bank account information in a country where the currency is in use.

In my case, first one is CAD, second one is EUR.

From there, you can send money for free with a wire transfer from your French traditional bank, using IBAN, and it will land in your Wise account.

Then, you convert the amount in the other currency, they’ll apply the exchange rate of the day, with a small margin, smaller than traditional banks would do.

From there, you can get your money in your local CAD account. But wait, if your try to send a wire transfer, or an interac, you’ll be charged a fee, and we don’t like fees !

This is where WealthSimple comes to play again !! WealthSimple is partner with Wise, so as you know. Yet, you can just link the bank account in WealthSimple, as you’d do with any other bank account, and withdraw the amount you want from Wise to your WealthSimple account for absolutely no fee !!

That’s my cheapest way so far to transfer money between Europe and Canada, fairly quickly at low cost.

Again, I hope this will help some of you !

ProtonDrive on MacOS – How to recover your vanished local files

I’m using ProtonDrive on MacOs, with the idea of having an encrypted backup copy, versioning, online trash (to recover deleted files), and the ability to access my files when I need from my phone.

But in the last weeks, something bad happened, the whole ProtonDrive folder on the MAC vanished. Suddenly, the ProtonDrive app asked to login again.

I thought, ok, good, session expired, let’s reconnect. When reconnecting, only remote files appeared, with the little « not synced » cloud icon on them (available when online), and the worst, it hadn’t synced a thing for 2 months (missing any change or new files created for 2 months).

Ok, that Mac is a small MacBook Air M1 with only 8Gb of ram, and it does struggle with the RAM a lot, so, somehow, the sync in the client stopped syncing weeks ago (my guess is, it ran out of memory for the sync, but that’s my own guess).

Issue is, 2 months of work, accounting and other files vanished ! Bad bad bad. And even worse than that, remembering what was modified over 2 months, no idea.

So I started to redo the accounting work, as much as I could, and started to wonder, where did all these files go ? Nothing in trash.

I contacted Proton support, they’ve been great, as I asked « where the hell is the local folder ?! » … hoping to recover my local, cached files that didn’t sync, a little hope… And here is what I got :

And that’s where, all my files were hiding ! Browsing to the folder allowed to see the two folders, the new one that got re-created after the reconnected, AND, the old, original one, with all my local files still in there !

So I did copy most of them back in the new folder, which synced !

I hope this one may help some of you in the same situation, if your local system didn’t get destroyed, and you just did get disconnected / reconnected, or for some reason the proton drive client got reset, that’s how you may recover your files.

Make sure your proton drive is syncing, each time you save a file, take a look in the status bar, and ensure that when you click « save » on your document, in your proton drive folder, the client just sync them right away.

That’s it for this one ! I didn’t find the path online, until support shared it, so, I thought it could help others in despair !