I actually saw the Sharepoint error which you see Joplin showing, also in the OneDrive web ui the other day, when I was just trying to load the my drive page in my browser. I think that this might be a general OneDrive api problem that happens intermittently, that may be triggered to happen frequently if you send a lot of requests to it, which is what Joplin does for a large profile.
I've seen a number of threads on the forum mentioning the error, I think in one of the cases it was mentioned that although sync kept on hitting the error, the logs showed it was not stuck on the same file, but did slowly progress by keep on re-triggering the sync after each failure.
I did mention this in my old reply though, so you could give this a go in order to progress setting up your new device:
If both old and new client are both Joplin desktop clients, there should be no issue to copy this to a new pc, so long as you don't merge the folder with an existing Joplin folder on the new pc, but delete any existing folder before you put the new one in its place.
- I would like to try to copy the folder to the new machine but I am still afraid that there is some ID of the specific machine, maybe generated once per installation by Joplin in order to spot conflicts between the different instances. Or are you 100% sure this does not happen?
- I am also wondering why some errors are retried automatically while this error terminates completely the sync. If Joplin could retry, it would succeed.
Maybe the developer of Joplin could see these questions?
In answer to question 1, yes I'm completely sure it wont cause a problem. Worst case scenario the sync still wont work on your new machine, but as long as you do not merge it with another profile by accident, it wont cause any data loss, conflicts, or duplicates (I have thoroughly studied how the sync process in Joplin works).
But if you are still anxious to try it, you can create a jex export of your note collection on the original device for emergency recovery, before doing so
Maybe an option could be given to the user to choose to import the notes maintaining the original IDs? I expect this to be easy to implement and could solve all these problems. Could this be a viable route?
I did make a suggestion like that many months ago, to import while retaining all ids, but also create a new profile at the same time to avoid any conflicts.
I have made a number of code contributions to Joplin myself, and did make a brief attempt to implement that suggestion, but it did not behave as I expected it to, so I did not continue with it as it looked more complicated to do than it seemed.
That's only really useful for getting your profile onto mobile though which structures the profile data differently to deskop, and you wont have access to the data directory on mobile either unless you root your phone. Because with desktop as I've mentioned, you can just copy Joplin's data directory over - that will have the same effect, while also retaining all your settings and note history
I've gone and tested it myself to transfer the Joplin data from one pc to another. It works without issues and only requires that you enter the master password again the first time you use the profile on that pc. It even works if I use the same data folder for Joplin on both Windows and Linux
Thank you! Much appreciated
I am a developer, too.
Maybe later, I can try to let import notes maintaining IDs...