Well, this went four weeks without a reply and I didn’t come up with any better ideas, so I went ahead and restarted based on one of the ‘clean’ devices. To do this, I basically had to follow the steps from Can't Start Truly Fresh Install of Jopln which was a bit of a pain.
My immediate issue is resolved, but I’d like to point out that there were a lot of headaches here due to things that aren’t usefully exposed to the user. Things would have been much easier if the following things were actually accessible:
- Tags. If I could just actually delete tags, that would have solve this problem instantly.
- The ability to not to create the Welcome notebook when faced with a fresh install or empty DB. I know it’s not as bad as it used to be now that it doesn’t come with tags (and the fact that it did come with tags is what caused this problem in the first place), but deleting it is still an extra step and it leaves around revisions and image resources for a while that get copied up to the sync target, and I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve had to do this - including once per device again as part of this process.
- Stored dropbox auth/connection settings. I couldn’t figure out how to get Joplin to just forget the current Dropbox sync situation and start fresh, so I had to blow away the existing DB/files and start with a reimported JEX file instead, which also meant creating a new master key for encryption.