A few notes cannot be decrypted after initial sync

Support
1

Operating system

Android

Joplin version

3.2.7

Desktop version info

3.2.11

Sync target

Joplin Cloud

Editor

Markdown Editor

What issue do you have?

I have 5 notes a few resources and one folder and a few revisions that are marked as not able to decrypt. I use the beta encryption introduced in 3.2.

On my Mac I imported about 5000 notes in Joplin from Evernote. Before doing this I selected beta encryption. Once the encryption was completed I then configured a new Joplin Cloud Pro account and let it finish the sync.
So far so good.
I then went to Android, created a new profile and configured the new Joplin Could Pro account from above. It then asked me directly to enter the decryption password.
It then started to sync and locally decrypt locally. Whoa! much faster than before. The new encryption scheme works really fast.
At the end of the process all me notes looked fine however I have a message both on Mac OS and Android that "some items cannot be decrypted"

Is there a way to locate them? At least to get the creation date? Can I just delete them?

I suspect that the problem is from the initial sync on Android. I miss typed the decryption password the first time and it started doing things and then asked again for the password and then it work fine. Can this be?

What would be the better approach to ensure that I do not delete some thing import?

Thanks

2

Could you post a screenshot of what you have please? Normally it should be possible to click on the notification to view the items

3

Thank's for looking into this:

Screenshot 2025-02-09 at 08.27.07
Screenshot 2025-02-09 at 08.27.072028×2052 398 KB

Here the screenshot.

Thanks again.

4

Hi,
A month ago, I had a similar issue. Out of my four devices using Joplin, only my phone was affected. Selecting "Retry All" reduced the sync problems but didn’t fix everything.
I suspected that the unencrypted notes on my phone were the ones recently created on my laptop. Started when I enabled beta encryption on all devices except my phone.
Though I’m unsure of the exact cause, but here’s what I did to fix it:

  • Disabled sync on my phone.
  • Deleted notes and uninstalled Joplin.
  • Reinstalled Joplin app.
  • Enabled beta encryption.
  • Synced with OneNote after sometime—everything reappeared without issues. I don't know if it was logical or the right thing to do, but it solved the problem on my phone
5

Ok. Thanks. Here all my devices shows this. I could naturally go back and reimport everything and redo the who encryption, sync, decryption thing but this is a lot of time and it might happen again. I would prefer understanding what happened or have a way at least to understand what notes have been affected so that I can delete them and reestablish only them.

Thanks agin

6

I've run into a similar issue a couple times which was resolved by simply closing the apps on all but the system that has the decrypted note then manually resyncing (click or tap Sync Button) then reopening/Syncing the other systems.

If the notes have somehow been lost on all devices then I'm not sure what you could do but it's usually a new or recently edited note that doesn't quite sync properly. I'd make a bug report myself but I can't replicate the issue and the few times it's happened it was easily fixed.

I think it may have something to do with multiple devices trying to sync at the same time or perhaps devices resyncing too quickly perhaps because the sync servers are trying to make a backup while multiple syncs are happening or there's just some other issue with too much traffic/cross talk. Of course this is all just loose conjecture on my part using my limited experiences and knowledge of these systems.

7

Have you tried clicking the Retry button? What happens then?

Also please share your logs as that should say why it's not decrypting

8

Thanks for looking into this. If I click on the retry all then the orange error is removed but come back again after a few seconds. It seems not to be linked to the sync. If I click retry all, force the sync, the sync completes without error. It is only a few seconds later that the orange message about having some items not decrypted pops again.

Is this safe to post my log.txt or does it contains significant data?

Thanks again

9

The log.txt may contain metadata about your Joplin Cloud account eg. email address and name on the account, but other than that there isn't any personal data included

10

Thanks. I tried what you suggested but this did not work for me. I also deleted the notes that could not be decrypted and still had issues with the history. I finally got rid of the entire profile and will try later in a few versions down the road. So I will unfortunately have to stick with Evernote for an other few month... Thanks again for your suggestions and help.