Workshop
What you need: Proton Drive account
Time required: 15 minutes
If you don’t trust Google or Microsoft to safely store your sensitive documents online, Proton Drive is a great alternative. It can protect your data even if your password has been stolen (see page 62) and lets you share files more securely. You get 500MB of free storage by default, but can increase this to 1GB simply by performing three actions (adding a file, sharing a file and setting up data recovery). We’ll explain how to do these.
1 STEP Go to https://proton.me/drive and click ‘Create a free account’ (top right). You’ll see a choice of three packages – click the ‘Get Proton for free’ button on the left. Proton Drive will now prompt you to create a new Proton Mail address to register your account with, but thanks to the latest update you can also use your existing email address (such as a Gmail address). To do this, click ‘Use your current email instead’ 1 , enter your email address, choose a secure password, then click ‘Create account’. Proton Drive will then prompt you to enter a verification code (it’ll send this to the email address you specified) then choose a name, which will be displayed whenever you share a file with someone.
2 STEP Proton Drive lets you upload files in a similar way to Google Drive. You can either click the ‘Upload file’ button 1 or simply drag the file (or multiple files) into the middle of the window – a ‘Drop to upload’ message will appear when you do this. The upload progress of each file is displayed in a box in the bottom-right corner of the window 2 . You can use the tabs in this box to view all active, completed and failed uploads 3 . To keep your files organised you can create new folders (right-click and select ‘Create new folder’), then drag and drop files between them.
3 STEP To share a file, right-click it, then click ‘Get link’. A unique sharing link will be displayed 1 , which you can share by copying and pasting it into an email. Note that anyone with the link (including those without a Proton Drive account) will be able to access the shared file. To maintain control over your shared file, select ‘Privacy settings’ 2 , click the ‘Protect with password’ slider 3 so it displays a tick, then enter your chosen password. Anyone using the link will now need to enter that password to view or download the file. You can also limit how long the file is shared for by clicking the ‘Set expiration date’ slider 4 and choosing the date you want to stop sharing.
4 STEP As well as sharing individual files, y
