On my Android phone, for some reason I saw two copies of a To-Do list note. I had never encountered that before, but without thinking about it too much, I identified the one that was most recent, and deleted the other one. When I got back on my phone several hours later, all instances of that note were gone. I didn't worry about it too much; I figured my desktop Joplin still had the deleted note, so I would rescue it there when I got home.
When I started up Windows, I tried to see if Joplin had a command line option to start without sync, believing that if sync completed, it would delete the note from the desktop app as well. I subsequently found a statement by Laurent that Joplin has no command line options. Fortunately, when I started Joplin, I was able to quickly copy the contents of the note (select all - copy) before the sync deleted it as anticipated. I then simply recreated the note.
Is there any way to start the desktop app with sync disabled? I found the article Restoring Deleted Notes. But since I anticipated this scenario, starting Joplin with sync disabled would be a much simpler approach.
There is no way to disable the sync*. You can try to restore the deleted note, but really, the only way to protect yourself from this kind of a scenario is to have proper backups (which synchronisation is not). There is even a plugin for that (see https://discourse.joplinapp.org/t/backup-plugin/13964).
* You could do it in a hacky way by modifying the config file manually and disabling sync there before starting the program.
Thanks for the reply. I'd like to understand how to disable sync manually in case this situation arises again. BTW, I do have the Backup plugin installed and configured, so I have that option available to me if needed. But as I said in my original post, disabling sync and saving the note from within Joplin seems like a simpler option, since I anticipated this scenario.
In Windows, I found the configuration file in %USERPROFILE%\.config\joplin-desktop\settings.json. The only setting I see related to sync is this one:
"sync.target": 7,
What value would I set here to temporarily disable sync?