Posts that do not at least state the version number and operating system will not be answered.
Version 1.01.169 for Windows
I’ve been using Joplin with Dropbox for a few months and have been very happy. Tonight a strange thing seems to be happening. Joplin Sync began deleting remote items. It is currently on item 564.
Grabbed this image on item 238. Now it has deleted 611 items. I did not intentionally delete anything. Is this just a monthly or quarterly or whatever database cleanup? or is something wiping out all my data?
I am not noticing anything missing so far and would imagine I’d notice something as it has now deleted 698 items.
Will it stop? What is happening?
Neither of the 2 android devices I’m synced with is turned on or running Joplin at the moment. This began after I’d been away from the computer for about 30 minutes.
I don’t have much time now to try and investigate. Ended up deleting about 1,100 items. I don’t see that anything is missing though. It is just scary to watch a critical program managing important data telling you it is deleting hundreds of items and not have any idea what is going on. I’m guessing that either Joplin or Dropbox was doing some data maintenance, but it would be nice if the message was less scary.
If you still have an unsynced app (on mobile for example), you can compare the synchronisation statuses and see what items were deleted on desktop. We could indeed provide more info about what gets deleted, not in the sidebar, because there’s no space, but at least in the log.
This happened to me just now. I set up a new computer, installed Joplin, and then told it to sync with my Dropbox. That worked fine.
Almost immediately afterwards, it began doing the "Deleted remote items: X" for a long time, first hundreds, then thousands, which was worrying. However, no notes were lost.
I think I know why it happened. It seems that most notes now have no revision history. It deleted all the old revisions.
For me I don't mind this - I don't need to keep around copies of every time I changed a note, which takes up space. It appears that all notes older than 3 months have had their revisions deleted.
When I go to settings in Joplin, it has a setting "Keep note history for (90 days)" which I have checked. I assume that on my old computer I had it set to a higher value, so that explains why it suddenly deleted so much after setting it up on this computer.
So, here on Feb 16, 2025 my Joplin notes didn't sync this morning due a 502 bad gateway with joplincloud.com;
So I changed my sync target to DropBox from joplincloud on my phone and started the sync to the new target;
The first thing it started to sync was the cryptic "Deleted remote items" and got up to 8859 items! then it started syncing "Created remote items";
I remember this extended sync process back when I started using my new phone a few months ago;
So my conclusion is that we (at least me) were misinterpreting what the sync dialog was indicating: it isn't saying it is "Deleting" items, it is saying it is "Syncing" deleted items;
So apparently there is nothing to fear;
I wish the sync process was faster;
I also wish I hadn't had to switch from joplincloud, but the reason I use the app is to have access to my data and be able to sync reliably! I used to use Evernote and when it started letting me down I found Joplin; I wish Joplin had some features that Evernote had, such as drag and drop in checklists; and now since Bending Spoons took over the search functions in Evernote are ridiculously unhelpful and almost unusable; so much for "New and Improved"; sometimes a product is just fine the way it is, and adding new features that nobody wanted and never implementing features that people have asked for for years is just crazy! Just my opinion; so now I still pay for Evernote because I have tons of notes in there that I haven't gotten around to moving yet, I pay for JoplinCloud to help the devs, and now I'm using DropBox for my sync target because JoplinCloud had a 502 bad gateway
Not saying that I know what I am talking about, but I also had the same fear. Eventually, though I found an "top bar > help > export deletion log" option in joplin, and there majority of the entries were Revision.deleteOldRevisions so I assume it is the revisions. Although, I have no idea why it is deleting revisions, since I am pretty sure I was not changing for a LONG time, and even when I did change something it was not something massive.
