Backup: 1.5.1
Extra Markdown editor settings: 1.11.0
Menu items, Shortcuts, Toolbar icons: 1.1.0
Note list and sidebar toggle buttons: 1.0.3
Sync target
Dropbox
What issue do you have?
I do not expect anyone to provide a solution to this, but I would like to know if there is some sort of explanation of how what I experienced could have happened (apart from accidental error on my part).
I would like to refer to this Forum post Can't get a break / disappearing notebook & tags in which @Laurent says "What we'll do in a future version however is provide a detailed log of delete operations and why they happened, which should help diagnose issues like this." Was a detailed log of delete operations ever implemented and, if so, where can I find it?
My experience was that:
I spent 20-30 minutes creating/editing a new note using my Android phone with my Desktop Joplin installation open for reference.
Another user added a new note and may have synchronized their work during or after the time I had been working on my note (which may or may not have been sync'd).
I went and did something else, and when I came back, the new note from the other user was there and all that was left of my note was "Untitled" and an empty note. (I mean, the possibility exists that I inadvertently deleted the contents of the note before I left to do something else, but I don't think so - I would have noticed.)
This has never happened before, so I hope it's just a random thing. Still I would like to understand what might have happened. Could the other user adding a new note and synchronizing have wiped out the note I had been working on?
I would switch to the Joplin server, but the pricing for it is out of the question for my humble family recipe database accessible to <= 10 family members (only 5 of them active users - i.e., users who add content). I wish you would work out some other payment plan for families.
You can go to Configuration => Tools => deletion log, to view what was deleted recently. The relevant line is probably about the time you were editing the note or noticed it was missing.
Thank you. Deletion log looks a little like Chinese to me, but I appreciate being able to look at it and to try to make sense of it and there seems to have been some deletion activity at the time I was working on the wiped-out note. It never went to the Trash. Is it conceivable that the other user's activity/syncing caused this to happen because of some conflict that occurred in Dropbox - where the user's sync maybe occurred simultaneously with mine, and their sync won? Don't know a lot about how things work at a deeper level, but would appreciate being able to understand a bit more, in case it should happen again. Anyway, thank you.
It's also possible it's somewhere in Dropbox, a trash or inside some revision history feature. I don't know enough about it but it could be worth checking
@Marian Do you have a notebook called 'Conflicts' at the top of your notebook list on either your mobile and desktop device? If not, can you also check with the other user if they have the 'Conflict' notebook on their device? If it exists on any of the devices, check if your note is within that notebook
@mrjo118 thank you for that good advice! I did check my own devices and I checked with the other user, and there were no conflict folders still in existence. It's possible that they did exist at some point around the time of the event that I reported, but since the note was not a huge thing to reconstruct, I went ahead and put it all back together, which possibly would have wiped out any evidence of what happened. I will keep this idea in mind as something to check, in case it ever happens again. Thank you!
Admins - please delete my comment here if it is not allowed by the Joplin cloud terms of service.
It seems to me if you are just trying to have your family on a shared recipe book and have no need for independent sharing, separate notebooks, or other security then perhaps you could just use one account and have all the family devices log in under that Joplin account?
I looked into Dropbox. I noticed that there were two events that occurred at the same time, one involving the content of the wiped-out note, but not in a form that could be copy/pasted into the MD editor to restore the note (it had a lot of meta-data interspersed throughout). There were also files containing earlier versions of the note, also with a lot of meta-data. Then this note doesn't appear again until later when I recreated it. The vanished note appears to have had a Title. The other user made an update at an earlier time, so I think their activity was unrelated. I found some entries in Dropbox that had clean MD. When I recreated my note later, the associated Dropbox files still had meta-data interspersed throughout, and clean MD for my note didn't show up until the next day when I made a small update to the note. I wonder why some Dropbox entries have clean MD with the content of the entire note, and others have meta-data interspersed throughout. I still don't know what happened, but it has been interesting to explore a bit of what's underneath.
My current implementation is that all members sync to one Dropbox account which contains all of the data for our shared space. All members have read/write access to all folders in the shared profile (which is not ideal, but I'm doing regular backups). The shared space includes our own individual recipe folders which contain our own personal recipes as Notes (Family), other folders containing recipes from other sources (Other Recipes), and another section containing notes about gardening, health, and Joplin Admin (Other Topics). Is this a description of your definition of a "Notebook"? It seems you are suggesting it might be possible to do the same thing using Joplin as the Cloud instead of Dropbox. I would create an account and all users would sync to it? For some reason this did not occur to me before now, and I currently am not sure how I would feel about doing this, since there are such clear guidelines about the different membership types associated with using the Joplin server. If I were to abide by these, it would cost me about $360 annually for my Pro membership and Basic memberships for the rest of the family (for as much as anyone else is using the book - some do not use it at all, but have access - I would not want to ask them to pay anything). This is just too much. There was some relevant discussion here: Basic membership and notebook collaboration - #8 by Marian
Just to clarify - What I am reading is that you are functionally using one account (by sharing dropbox) - everyone has read/write access to everything that is contained in all Joplin contents (multiple notebooks). There is nothing contained in Joplin that everyone in your family does not have read/write access to.
If the above statement is true then it would seem to me to be within the terms of service to have one Basic account with a login to accomplish this. My reading of the terms seem to indicate that you can sync as many devices as you want to a single account. So all your family devices would login with the same account credentials (username and password) and would all be the same user. The other phones and devices would not really be syncing with your account - they would BE your account. So it would be identical to the case where you personally carried several phones and devices and had them all logged in and syncing to the same account. You would have no way of differentiating who is doing what editing, but it seems like that may be already happening with dropbox.
This seems like a common use case for a family recipe book so it would be nice if there was a clarification from official people if this use case is dis-allowed. Obviously a use like this isn't going to work for a business or anything where you need data security and segmentation - But it seems like it would work for families where everything is shared in common - and one person is really administering the system.
I have personally found that the syncing is more reliable and faster using a Joplin server (which the Joplin Cloud most certainly is) than with a file sharing system like OneDrive (I have not personally tried dropbox but I assume it has similar issues). Self hosting Joplin is not super easy so the Joplin Cloud is a nice way to get good performance.
@DoneWorkin : I very much appreciate your thoughts about this. I would prefer to have a Member subscription to the Joplin Cloud than to continue using Dropbox, so will look into migrating. Thank you!