Blog Inforeseau.com – Alexandre Blanc Cyber Security

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 !