I do work with attachments for notes but by far not in all cases, actually, this is pretty rare (an occasional PDF, mp3 or movie)
It's more that I have specific notebooks dedicated to certain usage-scenarios:
a growing "archive" of stuff that I collect regularly, researching topics, mostly webclip-stuff off the internet
a working collection of snippets that I write myself and that will increasingly turn into something like an article or a seminar
things like daily routine: to-do lists, shopping lists and so forth
Now I'd wish to be able to exclude the entire archive-notebook from sync, not just specific attachments or individual notes: just ALL of this notebook, all subfolders, the entire container.
What I'd wish to sync to my mobile devices, however, is both the working collection and the daily routine stuff. In my case, this is only a fraction of what's inside my JoplinProfile.
What I don't really understand is why it should be difficult implementing a switch for simply not syncing an entire notebook. Or why this should result in a bigger chance for user errors that wipe out a lot of data.
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By the way: an effective safeguard against such user-caused sync-errors and resulting data loss could be an automated check for what content is being synced with what other content and a warning before actually syncing - something like "your sync of 0 notes on Joplin Desktop 1 against 1299 notes on Joplin Desktop 2 will result in the deletion of 1299 on Joplin Desktop 2. Do you want to procedd and delete these 1299 entries?"
Whoever is not awake in that moment might safely be counted among the dead ...
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What I wish for could be either done via a rightclick option in the main gui or inside a dedicated section in options that lists all notebooks and gives an option to or not to sync.
The latter solution would result in a looong list inside that menu in cases where people have lots of notebooks. I tend to have hierarchies with as little different main folders as possible since then I can fold away a lot of subsequent structure with just one click - the madness starts underneath level one, so to speak ...
Or maybe, I did not really understand what you refer to as attachments. In that case I am sorry.
I understand what you wrote. I have an archive notebook myself, but really only to someday hopefully prevent it syncing!
When thinking this through, I realized that I really don't want to prevent syncing. I'd rather simply prevent downloading of attachments (PDFs, all photos in web clipped notes, anything that isn't text). Attachments probably take up 90%+ of the data storage more the vast majority of users, especially those who clip a lot of web pages.
The advantages of syncing such notebooks, but avoiding attachment downloading, is that ALL notes are available to search, but they don't take up nearly as much data without the attachments getting sent to the phone. I imagine such a thing would be far easier for developers to implement than selective sync.
I don't really see any disadvantages to this approach, only advantages. As such, I think its a far more useful feature than selective sync. My feeling is that selective attachment download is more likely to get implemented than selective sync as well. Is there some reason it wouldn't work for you?
I have a significant number of things I want available offline. Just not everything.
I feel like everyone is suggesting ways to fit a square peg in round hole. There are always workarounds. But a flexible tool is better than an inflexible one! This is not a rare, outrageous use case. Joplin is a great tool that should not be artificially limited by phone constraints, in my opinion.
While this is not a feature that's important for me (because my data is so much smaller than yours), I can definitely understand why you'd want it. What I don't know if how hard it'd be to implement or how high a priority it should be compared to other requested features, but all things being equal, I agree that giving people a choice to exclude some notebooks from syncing would be good. There are definitely some notes that I don't need access to on my phone.
Perhaps slightly related to this, I'd love to see the speed of syncing improve exponentially. I don't know what factors affect syncing speed the most, but if it can be improved a lot independent of internet connection speed, then perhaps at least one reason for wanting to exclude some notebooks from syncing would disappear.
Apologies, I missed your earlier comment about wanting access offline otherwise I can't see why the manual download solution wouldn't be appropriate.
Mostly but not always. There was a topic recently discussing the note taking app Trilium and that very much goes in the flexible direction but good lord is it complicated and daunting. Options are good to solve some problems but too many options can cause real issues for the learning curve and less technically savvy users.
I'm curious to see how this is handled with other applications. The main approaches I know about off the top of my head are Evernote's (which I don't think supports any kind of selective sync) and OneNote's (which supports sync settings per notebook at its highest level only).
Personally I like the OneNote approach of being able to open and close notebooks on a given device (whilst maintaining a single client install) and if extended to Joplin, each could have its own sync properties (e.g. different sync targets, encryptions etc.) but thats just me.
What sync target are you using? Nextcloud is buggy and defaults to a very slow speed on the desktop client (you can see the speed difference between mobile and desktop is considerable). WebDAV simply isn't really suited to this kind of sync.
The solution to bad sync protocols was basically solved by Joplin Cloud/Server which was designed specifically to work with Joplin rather than using inappropriate protocols which are either not suited to the task or keep changing and breaking things (cough, OneDrive).
I agree that complexity is bad. However, this is pretty easy to understand. Simply replace the attachment download option for "All" with a pick list of notebooks, and include an "All" override to select them all and auto-add newly created ones. Then, make the "Auto / manual" a separate option for behavior when opening a note with attachments that aren't downloaded. It would be very simply to understand for users.
As for other tools, I can tell you that Evernote used to support "Local only" notebooks, which did not sync. They removed the feature as part of their redesign. Many users became so upset by Evernote's wholesale removal of features, that they sought out alternatives. I was one of them, and it's how I found Joplin.
@Daeraxa I sync via Dropbox, which works fine as far as stability goes. But I have no idea if the slow sync speed is caused by Dropbox. Almost all my notes are just text, so we're probably talking a few KBs of new text each week. But when I do my weekly sync on my phone, it can take 40-50 seconds.
This is me exactly! I used Evernote for years, with financial etc. docs saved as local folders (not synched to Evernote) and everything else in normal folders (synced to Evernote). When they abandoned local servers and switched to force people to sync everything to Evernote's servers, I did not feel comfortable doing so, so I switched to Joplin. Since Joplin currently forces you to sync nothing or everything, I now use Joplin completely without syncing, and save all private files on it. I then use Evernote for everything I do want synced. A user friendly way to allow me to sync only certain folders would allow me to abandon Evernote completely and solely use Joplin (which I would prefer!)
Actually: I am still taking about exposing a per-notebook setting to exclude a notebook from syncing. Apparently a switch exists already. Maybe implementation is not such a big deal ...
Thinking about it again: Could this be done via a plugin?
Yes, read the sync code and understand how 2-way sync works. Then you will see why it has not been implemented. This has also been discussed in other topics and on gh I believe.
Let me ask you this. What will happen, if you sync X devices and turn off sync for one folder on device A? At one point you disable sync for the same folder on device B. Then after a while you decide to turn it back on on either device A or B, or both. What will happen?
@tessus While I think you raise a good question, I don't think the issue is insurmountable. The policy could simply to treat newly-synced notebooks as distinct, for example, which would result in both notebooks appearing on both devices when sync was re-enabled. Or probably better, the policy could be to merge the notebooks with no deletion, and duplicate all notes with the same IDs that have changed, or move them to Conflicts.
Nonetheless, I continue to believe that a per-notebook attachment syncing option would be a better choice for 90% of users (who are simply wanting to avoiding sync to save mobile storage space and sync time). It would also be easier to implement. I mentioned it in a previous reply and copied it below. What do you think?
I know what will happen. I just wanted to point out for the sake of this discussion that it is not just flipping a switch and that's it.
Additional comments: There might not be just 2 devices, but X number of devices. Syncing the distinctive sets of notes will become a mess, especially, if old note/notebook ids are still in use.
(Also, the sync target won't know that the notebook is no longer synced.)
How would both notebooks appear on all devices? What about the other devices that still sync that notebook?
There's nothing simple about this. Such a endeavor must be carefully planned and designed.
I'm not saying it is impossible, I'm just saying it is not easy and a rather complex task.
As with all projects priorities have to be set and this item has not been on the top of the list.
But the selective attachment sync is much simpler, and knocks out most of the basis for the selective sync feature. I think it should be implemented. That's my main point.
I know this has been a while, and if I get the chance I’ll try the sql option (but I’m definitely not a priori familiar with running sql and the like). I still think excluding (or including actually) notebooks would be a great feature to have in. Not only for convenience or space (eg: phone sync), but also for simple privacy. If one uses Joplin for both personal and work (usually a good tool sets in many aspects), it’d be very valuable to be able to select what gets synced where (some of us have to deal with the personal vs work computer, and not by choice!). But maybe I missed updates about this feature and it actually exists now?
Currently the feature was replaced by "Profiles". It allows you to have a separate profile (set of notebooks, notes and tags) that has different sync setup (or no sync at all)
You can access it via Menu -- File -- Switch profile
