I have years of patient notes on Joplin. I backed up to OneDrive. On the latest sync I was getting an error message telling me to disable fail safe in order to resolve some sync error. I disabled fail safe, but now all my notes are gone! I thought syncing would provide a backup but instead I can't find my notes! Even OneDrive folder does not have a lot of files.
You’ve learnt this already, but synchronisation can only be treated as a redundant copy. It is not a backup. Please also don’t fiddle with the fail safe, as it is there for a reason (precisely to avoid what has happened to you ).
Sorry to insist: SYNC IS NOT BACKUP. This is valid in general, nothing to do with Joplin. Any content deletion is propagated to all synced devices. If some or all of your content is deleted on one device, it is deleted everywhere.
I disabled fail safe, but now all my notes are gone!
You have learned this the hard way, please take a minute to learn what “fail safe“ means. Again, nothing specific to Joplin. It is usually a protection designed to protect yourself from your own mistakes. You should almost never disable a fail safe. If you ever do, make sure you know what you are doing and double backup everything before pushing the button.
Grok says: A fail-safe is a design feature or mechanism in a system that ensures it remains safe or operational even if a component fails or an error occurs. It’s a backup or precautionary measure to prevent catastrophic consequences, damage, or harm by automatically switching to a safe state or mode.
OneDrive recycle bin was empty, so that didn’t work.
I see that backup was enabled in addition to sync. Luckily I found the backup before today’s backup overwrote the previous backup. (I just changed it from 1 backup to 7 days of backups). I was able to restore and now I can breathe again.
That's a good point. Maybe that message should be improved. For example “before you disable fail safe, make sure to manually backup by exporting all your notes as a JEX file“
I just changed it from 1 backup to 7 days of backups
I believe 7 is the default, may I ask why you changed to 1 in the past? Having only yesterday's backup is very fragile. Unless of course you continuously backup your computer data somehow (for example on MacOS I use Time Machine). Do you?
I was able to restore and now I can breathe again.
Happy to hear this.
As your data is critical, may I suggest your learn about “3 2 1 backup strategy“ and set one up. Otherwise next time you might unfortunately not be so lucky.
I’ve had number of backup configured to 1 only as well and don’t think I’ve changed it from default. Probably it used to be default setting for some older versions of Joplin.
Seems like I was wrong on this one. The screenshot on Joplin Plugins - Backup shows 1 day not 7, thus 1 might have been the default value all along. ¯\(ツ)/¯
UPDATE Or not! According to grok the default was updated to 7 in a recent update.
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