Hi Proton Team,

I am writing to request a feature for Proton Drive web: native support for opening and extracting ZIP archives directly in the proton cloud.

When uploading thousands of small files (1 MB to 2 MB) over a 100 Mbps Ethernet connection, upload speeds drop significantly due to per-file transfer overhead. In contrast, uploading a single large archive fully utilizes the available 100 mbps bandwidth. Zipping files before uploading is the most efficient way to transfer large batch directories.

On my own research: this happens because Proton Drive applies end-to-end encryption, every file and folder is encrypted individually before it's uploaded. As a result, syncing a large number of small files takes significantly longer than syncing a single large file of the same total size (like a zip archive), which is encrypted once and therefore transferred more quickly. I do not how accurate my research is though...

However, because Proton Drive web cannot open or extract archives, these files become inaccessible unless they are downloaded back to a local machine. Can a zip file extraction feature be added to Proton Drive? So that I could upload the zipped/archived file directly in one single operation, which would significantly increase upload speed, and then extract the same uploaded file directly in the cloud.

I do not have a background in app development or server-side engineering, so I am unsure of the technical feasibility of my request. I will leave those details to your team to evaluate. If feasible, adding native archive viewing or extraction in the web app would solve the batch upload performance bottleneck while keeping files accessible in the cloud.

Thank you for your work on Proton Drive. Have a good day.

• Kaustubh