I recently wanted to switch from Evernote to Joplin.
Imported >500 notes, a lot of them with images. Went smooth, can’t complain.
But… on my mobile device I do not want to have each and every note and image synced - needs a lot of time and space.
My request is to sync only a small fraction, (maybe last n days, maybe only selected notebooks, to be discussed…) plus always sync some kind of search index so that every note can be searched, even not synced ones. Then, when clicked on a search result, the needed note can still be downloaded.
I can imagine there is some use, albeit limited, for a local (non synched) folder with notes. I am, however, afraid that eventually people will start complaining they lost notes since they forgot they were in the non-synch folder only.
Support for syncing only a small fraction of the notes, and maintaining a search index (and demand fetching) is complex and tedious. I doubt if it is worth it. Space and time contraints? I don’t think these are realistic, unless you are storing movies in notes.
My opinion: There are lots of other features more interesting and relevant.
There’s a plan to allow syncing the resources, which should take the most space, either only when opening a note, or when clicking on the resource. The preparation work for this is already done, so it’s just missing the option to download on demand.
Syncing only a small fraction of the notes however it not planned and it’s unlikely it will be implemented as the app is not really designed for this.
I think this is the only viable long-term solution for stability and practicality. As an early user of Evernote, I have 20k notes created over 7 years. I think eventually most users will accumulate this many or more. It’s simply not practical to do full local sync of all these notes.
The Joplin Android and even Windows desktop clients are pretty much unusable for me - way too slow, with this many notes.
This is the same reason why GMail works so great - blazing-fast server side search over 15 years of email, while the local clients keep 30 days to a year of data.
