rclone: Can't connect pCloud account protected by 2FA

I received this email from pCloud support

Thanks for your e-mail. Unfortunately, most of the 3rd party apps/software do not work with 2FA enabled. The developers are aware of the issue but we still do not have a workaround. If you have any additional questions, please don’t hesitate to ask.

So it looks like we have to wait for pCloud to fix the problem here.

The issue seems to have been finally fixed by pCloud:

I successfully managed to login to my account with 2FA activated.

I did not face the issue described above, maybe because I didn’t enable 2FA. Let me test out with 2FA enabled. If we are to implement 2FA support, we would need more info.

@ncw Yes, I have 2FA enabled on my pCloud and most accounts!

I reached out to pCloud support on Twitter and by email. Heard back on the former channel:

I think this is maybe a bug at pCloud… I tried disabling “implicit grant” to make the app more secure but that didn’t help. In the mean time I’ve emailed pCloud support to ask them what is going on.

Thanks.

To be honest, I only use pCloud because their Linux Desktop is the best cloud storage sync I’ve found for the platform so far. The performance is much smoother than mounting Google Drive. But maybe it’s time to switch: I love rclone and think it is very important to regularly backup all cloud storage!

I received this email from pCloud support

Thanks for your e-mail.

Unfortunately, most of the 3rd party apps/software do not work with 2FA enabled. The developers are aware of the issue but we still do not have a workaround.

If you have any additional questions, please don’t hesitate to ask.

So it looks like we have to wait for pCloud to fix the problem here.

I think this is maybe a bug at pCloud… I tried disabling “implicit grant” to make the app more secure but that didn’t help. In the mean time I’ve emailed pCloud support to ask them what is going on.

@creativeprojects can you see what it is trying to redirect to?

If I try making a new pcloud remote on linux (also without 2FA) I get this

Error: Auth state doesn't match

Description: Expecting "UNs6tzVmjoz85Ou7qBbpDw" got ""

So pcloud has lost the state we sent it somewhere along the line.

The error on macOS is different and I don’t understand why!

Can you all have a go with this which attempts to work-around the problem?

https://beta.rclone.org/branch/v1.51.0-369-g4599e484-fix-4210-pcloud-oauth-beta/ (uploaded in 15-30 mins)

I am facing this issue as well. I tried to setup my pcloud remote in a virtual machine first.

rclone v1.51.0
- os/arch: linux/amd64
- go version: go1.14.2

When trying to authorize rclone with pcloud, I get a redirect error. I am able to login succesfully, but the redirect is the problem I guess? So effectively I cannot setup my pcloud remote on a second machine at the moment using 2FA.

@KRossKoWolf Tried your approach but got this:

I had this issue also, but managed to resolve it by signing into pcloud on the browser first with login & 2FA, then doing rclone authorize “pcloud”. This then showed a page allowing me to authorize, then the Success page. Then in the terminal I was given a token, which I entered on my headless box, and it’s all working now.

@danielrosehilljlm

Thanks for reaching out to their support.

In the meantime, I am using an awkward workaround to sync pCloud with my intended destination (Backblaze B2).

Can you describe your work-around for others who come across this issue?

Happily. Although I think that calling it a workaround is being too kind to myself.

I just bundled my pCloud together into an archive, downloaded that on an EC2 instance, and then pushed it up to B2 (so effectively a local --> remote from a cloud server).

Documented here: https://github.com/danielrosehilljlm/Master_Backup_Strategy/blob/master/documentation/pCloud to B2 over EC2.md

@danielrosehilljlm

Thanks for reaching out to their support.

In the meantime, I am using an awkward workaround to sync pCloud with my intended destination (Backblaze B2).

Can you describe your work-around for others who come across this issue?

@Sunil-P Yes. This behavior only occurs when trying to connect rlcone to a pCloud account with 2FA enabled. However, in light of the fact that using 2FA is strongly advised, particularly when securing cloud file storage, I think that it would be a good issue to address. In the meantime, I am using an awkward workaround to sync pCloud with my intended destination (Backblaze B2).

I am also interested as I have 2fa activated on pCloud. I wonder how this has not come up before as I was expecting most people having that activated by default.