I have a large number of files on a personal Proton Drive (mainly .pdfs of various books and backed up photos from my iPhone) which I have mounted to my EndeavourOS system using S3Drive, which relies on RClone on the backend. The drive mounts correctly and will sync files being moved in and out of the drive directory correctly. However, if I try to open a file from the mounted directory on my EndeavourOS desktop, this almost always takes a long time (several minutes in some cases) and will often cause the relevant application to not respond or crash.
I use the Gnome DE so I am accessing files through Nautilus. I have tried using other file managers but the issue is reproduced with Thunar and PCManFM as well. My preferred .pdf viewer is Okular but this issue also happens using Evince and Zathura/MuPdf. GNOME image viewer also has this issue opening photos.
What are some things I can run to identify the root cause of this issue? Is there a terminal command that can tell me what’s happening when I try to open files from my mounted drive?
What switches are you using with Proton Drive on Rclone? In particular, I would check to see if this is being setup correctly:
(From Rclone docs)
--protondrive-enable-caching
Caches the files and folders metadata to reduce API calls
Notice: If you are mounting ProtonDrive as a VFS, please disable this feature, as the current implementation doesn’t update or clear the cache when there are external changes.
The files and folders on ProtonDrive are represented as links with keyrings, which can be cached to improve performance and be friendly to the API server.
The cache is currently built for the case when the rclone is the only instance performing operations to the mount point. The event system, which is the proton API system that provides visibility of what has changed on the drive, is yet to be implemented, so updates from other clients won’t be reflected in the cache. Thus, if there are concurrent clients accessing the same mount point, then we might have a problem with caching the stale data.
I’ve personally never had any luck with mounting a Proton Drive. I do use it as a backup, with Rclone/Restic.