How to Get Deleted Notes Back? (App deleted Notes)

[Jdtnicholson]

Operating system

Android

Joplin version

3.0.8

Sync target

OneDrive

What issue do you have?

I have the app running on two Android phones and most of my notes went missing. My desktop is too old to install it to get the backed up notes from onedrive (I have 90 note history enabled). How do I get them back?
In detail:
Phone 1...In my main notebook there are two notes I created most recently and the rest are gone. About 1200 are missing. In the conflict notebook there are 25 notes which were all were edited in the last 3 weeks. Trash and 'all notes' tabs are empty.
Phone 2...Most of the 1200 missing notes are there. Some are missing. No conflicts. Trash is empty.

Also exporting works on phone 2 but not 1. Says there is nothing to export...

Thx

Log file

mobile-log2.log (229 KB)

[LeoW]

Hi,

Can you tell by logging into your OneDrive account that your phones are at least one of them anyway successfully synchronizing to your OneDrive account?

If at least one of your two phones has a complete copy of your notes you should be able to export them to a folder and then copy them to your OneDrive folder where you have synchronization set up and if synchronization is not set up you should do that.

[Jdtnicholson]

Hi,

The phone that lost notes is syncing. I did export the notes from the other phone to a file. How do I put it on onedrive so that it will be recognized by the app? There are still some that weren't there. Is there a way to browse the files already on onedrive to find them?

[LeoW]

Hi,

If you open a browser window and log directly into your OneDrive there should be a folder called apps/joplin

On your phone when you choose to export all notes as JEX the intention is for it to be imported by Joplin on a computer. Unfortunately, as you mentioned above your computer can't run the desktop version of Joplin.

Is there any way that you can get temporary access to a computer that is capable of running Joplin?

What is your version of Windows? And how much memory do you have RAM memory?

One option you have is to download a Linux distro ISO file that can be run in live mode which means that it doesn't get installed on your computer but you boot from a USB flash drive into Linux which will run on older Hardware. You can use Rufus to create a bootable USB drive of say Linux Mint. I would get and run the Xfce Edition.
Xfce is a lightweight desktop environment. It doesn’t support as many features as Cinnamon but it’s lighter on resource usage.

This is where you can get Joplin for Linux:

Install Joplin on Linux | Flathub

Then, you install Joplin for Linux. Above.

You can mount your onedrive cloud drive in linux and the Joplin for Linux will be able to files that you exported on your phone.

If you have the OneDrive software on your mobile phone you can upload the exported data to a folder on your OneDrive temporarily. Or, you can plug your phone into your computer and copy the files to your OneDrive temporary folder.

Then, you use a program called Rclone to Mount Your onedrive in Linux. It's not straightforward because it's a command line program but you can go to their forum and create a login and send me a message and I will help you mount your OneDrive in Linux and load Joplin. I am LeoW with a pink L.

I can help you install Joplin for Linux here.

Basically, you will need to install Flatpak which is easy, and then run:
sudo flatpak install flathub net.cozic.joplin_desktop

Unfortunately, you can't simply take the exported files from the mobile version and copy them directly to the synchronization folder on your Microsoft OneDrive.

You need to come up with some way to temporarily be able to install Joplin desktop somewhere so you can restore your data that you exported from the one phone that does have your files.

Linux should run well on your older Hardware in order to accomplish this one task.

UPDATE: Possibly better idea and easer.

If your phone that has no data is properly synchronizing with OneDrive and you have no files on your OneDrive folder in Apps\Joplin you can transfer or copy the exported JEX files from the phone that has them and put them on the phone that doesn't. There is an option to import from JEX which is the output format used by your other phone.

[Jdtnicholson]

Ok. I am seeing about borrowing a computer for a while. It may be either Mac or Win. The one I have at the moment is a Mac running 10.6 with 8GB RAM. I looked for a copy of Joplin for it but it's too old. The apps folder in OneDrive has two folders called Graph and Graph 1 and have a ton of files I assume are Joplin. Should there be just one folder? Wondering if it made two for some reason.

The easier option sounds better. According to Joplin on the phone with no data it is synchronizing but the Onedrive folders do have files. If I import the JEX file from the phone with data will it overwrite notes I have on the phone without data? (Because I have some notes on that phone that are not on the phone that kept most of the data).