Help needed with backup recovery

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I’m using Joplin on MacOS, and I wanted to remove my encryption password since I forgot password anyway… I have first disabled password and then synced with empty folder and that was mistake, didn’t know that the items that existed will be removed…
I partially recovered notes but not notebooks and I can’t see included pictures…
What I will try to do next to fix: remove whole profile folder run joplin and sync with my backup folder but since I don’t remember my encryption pass I was wondering If i can copy my encryption password as a record from another sqllite to the fresh sqllite db in a new profile? if so then what exactly do I need to copy?

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Welcome @angrybird

You can extract the password from the database. Have a look at this post.

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Thank you so much! That saved me tons of recovery work! This time got lucky wont allow this to happen every again lol But at the same time started questioning Joplin security, keeping unencrypted password in db probably not good idea even though it helped me.

PS. I wrote this accidentally under the post you refereed me to lol

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@angrybird

You are welcome.

Under the other post where you left a comment @laurent has put a link explaining what Joplin encryption is about. Copied below:

https://joplinapp.org/faq/#could-there-be-a-password-to-restrict-access-to-joplin

Basically, Joplin encryption is not there to protect the notes ON your device but when the notes LEAVE your device for syncing in the cloud. If you think about it, if someone has access to your computer to a level that allows them to get to the Joplin database you have far bigger problems than losing your Joplin E2EE password!

Not because I have any particularly sensitive data but more as “insurance” in case of theft / loss, I use full disk encryption on all my devices. Then if I do ever have data that needs protecting, anywhere on my device, it is protected by default.

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Thanks for taking the time to explain. I agree it all make sense, I’m in the middle of transition from macos to Linux and compartmentalizing everything with automated encrypted backups so I understand better now that tools like Joplin should not be treated as your first line of defense of your data. Thanks.