Custom notes data directory

Features
1

Hi all,

I'm evaluating Joplin as a possible alternative to Evernote (as it happens, they've slowly reduced the free version to a useless joke with very few features, with the evident purpose of catching you inside their software and forcing you to pay a rather expensive subscription). So far, a very good app, but I'm concerned of one issue.

I'd like to synchronize between my Android phone and my macOS laptop, using Google Drive. I understand Joplin doesn't support the latter, but there are Android apps that can synchronize a local folder with a GDrive account (eg, the excellent FolderSync) and that's the normal behaviour for the GDrive client for macOS.

The problem is Joplin doesn't seem to be able to work with a directory of choice. I mean, in the synch options, there is 'synch with the file system', but there is no option to just tell Joplin to use a custom directory directly for storing notes data. I could find where Joplin stores its data and synchronise that directory (somewhere under /data, I guess), but the existence of the 'synch with file system' makes me think this might not work, eg, is the Android formats for Joplinp's working files the same as the desktop apps? That is, could it work if I just synch the app's hardwired work directory? I suspect not.

I'd like to synch just one data directory because it's simpler than Joplin <-> filesys <-> GDrive, and also because presumably, the latter would need double the storage space.

Moreover, I'd like to be able to combine this with end-to-end encryption.

Thanks in advance for any help.

2

You guess correctly that it's not going to work, even if you could access the dir on Android (and you actually can if you have root).
The format is is the same for all apps but it's a single SQLite database file (expect for resources). You can't really sync it, at best you'd override the state of one client with another client's state, at worst you'd corrupt your data.

3

Many thanks @roman_r_m for confirming this, I'll try with filesys synch, then.

Joplin seems very good, GDrive synch would be a great addition.

Marco.