I could use a little help with the multiple profiles feature introduced a while ago.
I am using Joplin v 2.9.4 on a Mac (Monterey), syncing to a webdav folder on nextcloud - other details seem irrelevant to my question.
When I create a new / second profile I notice two things:
a new subfolder is created inside the old Joplin profiles folder,
when I open the new profile with Joplin ("switch to ...") and go to settings -> sync, I see that the sync settings are completely empty (no target).
While this makes perfect sense to me, it begs the question : during the next sync in the default profile does the new subfolder mentioned above also get copied or not ?
I do not want to test it because I don't like to have the notes in the new / second profile uploaded into a cloud drive.
Any hope somebody will see this request ?
Today I have also noted that when a plug-in in the new / second profile gets deleted, the same plug-in also disappears from the original profile. This worries me a little bit as it shows there is even more of an inter-dependency between the two profiles than I had expected. Ideally I would want to be able to move one profile to another device or user, without this having an impact on the other. Or do I miss some imprtant aspect ?
Now I am totally confused. The "multiple profile" feature was requested by so many people a year ago or so. Now that it's here, nobody seems to care about the details. What am I missing ?
As you've observed yourself, profiles share parts of their configuration while keeping the rest separate. When it comes to sync specifically, you need to set them up independently. As a result, this means that you can't use a common sync target like Dropbox, etc. for both of them because doing so will end up merging the notebooks and notes into a single database.
Personally, I'd prefer for profiles to either keep everything but notebooks and notes shared or completely separated (like profiles in Chromium) instead of the current hybrid approach. Also, not being able to have multiple profiles open at the same time makes the feature extremely limited, at least in my use case, as I normally need to be able to view both Joplin windows at the same time (e.g. in order to easily copy/move content between them).
Lastly, you could still use the filesystem target to sync multiple profiles through services like Dropbox, etc. but with a caveat which is that you won't be able to sync them on mobile, unless you use something like Syncthing which does proper two-way sync on Android (instead of offering only per-file download/upload on demand like most other solutions).
Thanks for responding.
Fully agree, when I was looking / asking for multiple profiles a long time ago, never had I expected to see a hybrid approach like this implemented. While I can live without seeing both profiles side by side, the fact that the plug-in fauna is inseparable limits the use of the profile feature. On the other hand, I am sure the devs have had their rational to do it that way - would only be nice if they could elaborate on it.
Now that "more than one profile" is already implemented ... in this way, it should be (... yes, I know) relatively easy to completely separate two profiles from each other.
More thoughts, some interesting, are found in this discussion
Yeah, I personally just run two separate instances of Joplin, each of them set to sync through the filesystem target (in different folders) and Syncthing between multiple Windows and Android devices. The problem is that on Windows the code requires a little bit of hackery in order to allow starting two instances at the same time (see https://github.com/laurent22/joplin/issues/591#issuecomment-898102141), and on Android I need to use an app cloner to create a separate Joplin app to utilise just for the second instance.
For the record, my use case is to have one Joplin instance for personal notes, and yet another instance for shared family notes.
Thanks tomaz, this helps. I had thought about running multiple instances of Joplin on my mac (less a pain than under windows). But it's not ideal either. Still hoping to see a dev response on the rational of the current implementation.