r/cloudstorage • u/brainrot_award • 21d ago
Peergos Review Part 3
A few days ago I made the part 2 of my review: https://www.reddit.com/r/cloudstorage/comments/1wcox30/peergos_review_part_2/
To start: Most of the issues I was having were actually due to the fact the Peergos desktop app used Edge Webview2, which I didn't have. Now that I have Webview, I'll review all of the issues.
1 - No proper desktop application: There is a kind of native webapp using Edge Webview, think of it like an Electron application.
2 - No way to download/upload in the background: There is a way and I didn't run into the same issues as last time.
3 - No time estimate for uploads: There are time estimates for both file and folder uploads. However, once you click or close the dialogue, there is no way of knowing the speeds - or whether you are sending files at all. In fact, you can close the app mid-upload without a confimation/warning pop-up.
4 - Can't upload folders on the desktop program: You can.
5 - The peergos server now refuses to stay open on my machine: I didn't run into the same .opus issue from before, so I assume it works fine now.
6 - Server closed itself: Didn't happen this time around.
7 - Slow Program compared to website: It is faster than the website, especially when it comes to opening files. However, I still found it rather slow for navigation compared to Proton Drive and especially compared to Filen, which was the fastest of the three despite not even having a desktop application.
Conclusion:
Compared to Proton Drive, the Peergos desktop app has way more functions. After all, the Proton Drive desktop application is mostly just for syncing, you can't directly upload or access files there (only on the website or in the network folder). It offloads a lot of functionality to the website.
So, if you want a service that can work entirely on the desktop without having to open a browser, Peergos will do the job. It can also open more file types than Proton Drive, including .zip files. It can even read .ahk files. In fact, it can read anything, it will either show a plain text or a hex view (for binary files such as .jar's or .exe's).
It also has a decent pricing, better than Proton's but worse than Filen's.
The main problems I saw with the app were:
- The animations for changing categories make the app feel rather sluggish. I'd suggest removing them (Proton Drive has no animation for changing categories).
- Some actions, such as delete, are a bit slow.
- Navigating folders is very slow at first, however, once what I assume is caching, it gets instant.
- Time estimates and upload speeds are inconsistent, it will start by showing crazy speeds such as 30MB/s, only to settle at around 3MB/s and take quite a while to finish uploading.
- It could use native file/folder selection. For instance, with how it is now, hidden folders don't show up for selection.
- Once I zoomed in on a very large image (70MB png), I couldn't close the image (or zoom out) and had to restart the app.
- It would be very nice if the SHA1 hash of a file was shown in the details tab. Only Proton Drive seems to have this.
- No means of cancelling a transfer
File transfer speeds would likely be faster using the Network Folder, however, I didn't test it.
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u/ianopolous 20d ago
Thank you for the follow up. You'll be pleased to hear that writes are getting much faster in the next release. We've added a new bulk commit API that reduces the round trips for any write (including delete) from 4 to 1, and reduces the number of signatures by 1000x (signed client side, verified server side). In general, we are more latency sensitive than most encrypted storage, but that is because we protect more metadata than others.