How to change sync target?

I would like to thank you guys for creating such amazing software, Joplin is really helpful and I have created lots of different notebooks and notes.

However, the old bucket I used in AWS S3 had some trouble and I deleted it, then I created a new bucket and start to sync notes from my laptop. To my surprise, every note on my laptop was deleted, everything. Now I only have a copy of the notes on my iPhone, when I configured the new bucket and start to sync, it shows me the following error:

Last error: Fail-safe: Sync was interrupted because 100% of the data (333 items) is about to be deleted. To override this behaviour disable the fail-safe in the sync setting.

My question is, how can I recover all the notes from my iPhone? I am using Joplin 12.5.3 on my iPhone and Joplin-Setup-2.5.12 on my laptop.

Hi, welcome to the forum

Do I get it right, notes in the cloud were deleted, then Joplin desktop was connected to the new bucket with no data,
after that fail safe gave a warning that the notes are going to be deleted?
so did you uncheck the fail safe checkbox? (Yeah, better not to do that)

Firstly, better to leave iPhone data alone for now. There's no easy way to export or backup data from mobile at the moment. So better to leave for the last option.

Secondly, have you been doing backups?
The best exit is to restore your cloud data one way or another. Maybe there's snapshot of the bucket before the data deletion? Or data in the wastebasket? Any other desktop synced before the deletion?

Thanks very much for your quick response. Here is my step:

  1. notes in the cloud were deleted, then Joplin desktop was connected to the new bucket with no data; -- Yes
  2. after that fail safe gave a warning that the notes are going to be deleted? -- If I am correct, I did not see it on my laptop, but see it on the iPhone.
  3. so did you uncheck the fail safe checkbox? (Yeah, better not to do that) -- everything is left default after I have installed the Windows package, and this checkbox is checked on my iPhone.

I did not do any backup, and I have uninstalled the Windows version and reinstall a new one. After I have recovered my notes, I will do backup regularly.

I have come up with a new idea. Could you help me to check whether it works?

  1. Sync the notes from my iPhone to some other cloud services, like Joplin cloud, OneDrive, or WebDAV etc.
  2. Sync the notes from these new cloud services to download the notes, then all these notes will be downloaded to my laptop, then do some backup.
  3. Then remove everything from my iPhone, and set up a new Joplin-AWS connection.
    Does this work?

BTW, this software is really amazing. To be honest, I have used more than 10 notes, and now I am certain that Joplin is the very thing I am looking for.

Your plan should work, yes, if you connect to a sync target type you have not used before then the application should sync its data to it.
Once you have sync'd that to desktop and made backup upon backup of your data then you should be good to go with trashing the old client(s) and starting over.

As @graphit0 says, you cannot currently export the data from your phone. However what you may want to do to ensure the process won't cause your notes to be lost is to manually "export" each one (or only select ones) by going into the note, pressing the menu button and hitting "share" then sending that note data somewhere safe (Apple Notes for example) so at the very least you have the raw note content in case there is anything irreplaceable.

I have noticed that "share" function, and it works.

However, I have some attachments stored in Joplin, but when I tried to share them, the attachments could not be shared, any ideas about this issue?

I also tried WebDAV backend sync, but it could not sync the attachments as the "share" function, so another question comes. Is there any cloud backend (besides AWS S3) that I could sync the notes as well as the attachments within the notes?

I see the issue, it isn't a part of the functionality I've used before, it seems it just exports as pure markdown without the resources and I don't think there is a way around this (I think this is probably a target for improvement which I've touched upon, it seems like a share to pdf or html option would be the way forward).

Other than that I'm afraid I don't know of a way to access the resources and notes together, on Android the entire profile can be exported but iOS doesn't allow that.

I'm not sure I follow here? Do you mean you tried using the share function to send to a sync'd folder? I think the share function sends the same content no matter the target.

1 Like

This topic was automatically closed 30 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.