After spending a week importing notebooks from Evernote, something has gotten messed up with Joplin Cloud syncing. Without getting into all the details, I would just like to start over from scratch. Even that is proving very difficult. I used the victor plugin to delete everything, which seemed to work. But when I then tried to empty the Trash of a few tidbits, the program commenced on a lengthy process of "Delete remote items: 4071" etc which has been going on for an hour. I just want to start over and hope for better results next time. Is this possible?
It seems to be doing what it's supposed to be doing so I'd suggest you let it finish? It can be time consuming to import a complete Evernote note collection and sync it, there's no way around it, but if you let it finish it should work fine and be fast afterwards
Thanks for responding, Laurent. In the end I gave up after waiting overnight for my phone to sync a few hundred imported notes. Something was clearly very wrong and so I deleted everything and started over.
This time I imported the Evernote notebooks in small batches into the Windows desktop app. The first batch consisted of 10 notebooks containing 143 notes. Joplin imported them easily and synced quickly to Joplin Cloud. I installed the Android app and it too synced quickly. So far, so good.
I then imported a second batch of 29 Evernote notebooks containing 440 notes. The desktop app has been syncing for about 15 minutes and isn't done. At the moment it says "Created remote items: 905" which doesn't make any numerical sense to me. Even if it's resyncing everything (but why?) I can understand all 39 notebooks and 583 notes being enumerated as 622 remote items, but not more. So what on Earth is Joplin doing right now? Some understanding of its counting of remote items would help reassure me it's doing something sensible. Without this understanding, I am just hoping that it finishes, sometime. Whether that is minutes or hours or days from now, I do not know.
If 10 notebooks with 120 notes worked, you took a giant leap with 29 and 400 notes. If it is all text based then who knows what the reason is. If there is multimedia content, then that could take ages.
My guess is that as it imports each note, it is also simultaneously synchronizing to the cloud in linear progression to maintain continuity. I could be wrong about this as it is an uneducated guess as I have never used Joplin cloud, nor know or understand the backend processes.
I would say just do it in batches of 10 and take the tine to get it done.
It could be tags, resources or something else. No matter what you need to let it finish something - either deleting everything or uploading everything. Otherwise it's indeed difficult to know what's going on and usually it gets worse the more you try to start over.
For me it's very fast to setup a new device with over 20,000 items, just a few minutes. That's what I love about Joplin Cloud compared to Nextcloud for example that was taking hours. But maybe it depends on your connection speed or certain properties of your note collection such as having many small resources or tags.
Indeed - that's a possible performance bottleneck and can happen when you have many clippings from the web, where every tiny graphics item is saved as a separate file in Joplin's resource folder.
However cryptic this counting might be - it's an advantage over other note-taking apps that you have this kind of transparency out-of-the-box. In all similar apps I know of that's taking place under the hood.
Many thanks to laurent and the several other users who commented here. In the end, I did start over from scratch by using, on Windows, the victor plugin and, on Android, by wiping the Joplin data and cache and reinstalling. I then reimported my Evernote notebooks in (so far) seven chunks, synchronizing the Android app after each chunk. By chunk I mean a group of 10 to 30 notebooks, each containing 20 notes on average. Almost all the notes are one-page pdf scans. There are no tags other than, perhaps, native Evernote tags.
So far the process has proceeded without any hitches. My phone spent a couple of hours in total doing synchronization. Both it and Joplin Cloud now report about 2 GB in total. All of this seems pretty normal and I will keep going until I've transferred my entire Evernote database, about 4 GB.
The only remaining puzzle is laurent's comment that setting up a new device with 20K items takes him just a few minutes. In my case the number of items is one order of magnitude smaller and the time required is one order of magnitude larger. My internet connection seems fast enough (100 Mb/s) to not create any bottleneck. I wonder what accounts for the difference of two orders of magnitude. Any ideas out there?
Update: I just read _vg's very interesting and extremely helpful post "How to survive with a large dataset on Joplin". I wish I had read this first because I see now that 'Attachment download behavior' is set to Always. That setting certainly seems a likely candidate for long syncing times! What happens if I now change it to Auto? Anyone know the answer?
The new setting will be valid, as soon as you change it to automatic. In other words: Attachments, that are already synched to your device will stay downloaded also under the new setting. But attachments, that are not on your device yet will only be synched to and downloaded on your device, when you klick on their symbols in the note body.
