iCloud backups : Joplin settings (if not notes) should be included!

Operating system

iOS

Joplin version

13.2.5

What issue do you have?

Apple documentation says that iCloud backups create a copy of information on your iPhone that are not already synchronized with iCloud. So basically you should not loose anything after a backup and a restore.

That's why when restoring from such a backup I expected to get back my Joplin notes, as they aren't synced with iCloud... which was not the case. As they are indeed synced but with Dropbox, I can understand though... and am currently in the (very long) process of syncing them back from Dropbox.

But if I didn't get my notes from the backup, I didn't get either my Joplin settings which were lost (at least some of them : plugins activation e.g.). I don't know why this happened but that seems a bug to me, considering Apple documentation (see above).

Regards,

Grégory

This thread a bit outdated, but probably still applies; according to comments here Reddit - Dive into anything icloud will only back up data which the developers of the app designate it to do so. It may have been a deliberate choice by the developers to not allow backup of the note data to iCloud because Joplin is a privacy focused app. Or it is just something they have not considered or a feature they decided not to implement.

My point is that Joplin settings (not note data !) can hardly be considered private data and hence should be backed up, don't you think ?

That depends. Storing the authorisation key for your dropbox account, or your private encryption key if you use E2E encryption would be considered sensitive data. It may require segmentation of the local application data that Joplin creates in order to support this, so this might be a feature request rather than a bug. But one of the Joplin devs could clarify that.

It's also worth noting that the iOS app is not a native app, so there could potentially be a limitation for being able to support this feature using the react-native framework that is used to develop the app

Yes. I was indeed referring to the most common settings, those that carry preferences but no real personal data like activating or not Mermaid syntax, plugins... booleans, actually :slight_smile: !

And for sensitive data like what you mentioned I suppose iCloud backups may be encrypted ? I heard about end to end encryption on other forum topics, maybe this is even done for the full backup ?

You could raise it as a feature request here:

Done

From my experience (one or two years ago) I don't think this is the case. As every newly installed app is included in iCloud backup by default, so is Joplin. I learned this the hard way when my storage quota on iCloud shrunk by 1.6 GB all of a sudden, which was exactly the size of my note collection in Joplin. Since then I've been careful to exclude Joplin from iCloud backup whenever I install it on a new iOS or iPadOS device.

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On my iPhone, the backup size for Joplin on iCloud (275 MB) is larger than the size of documents and data for Joplin locally (172 MB).

I don't understand that... but whatever the explanation what's worse is that if all this backup data on iCloud is notes data it is not restored eventually anyway (see my first post) ! :person_shrugging:

This is not done on Joplin's side (E2EE can only be set up for official sync targets such as Dropbox), but can be done on Apple's side by activating Advanced Data Protection for iCloud (Apple's concept of E2EE, which is of course not open source, but a huge step forward compared to the status quo ante).

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Haven't tried it for myself, but I'm afraid that's true: Joplin doesn't support restoring its data from an iCloud backup. The only backup and restore operation Joplin officially supports is exporting as JEX and importing again AFAIK.

To sum up :

  • Some Joplin settings are currently included in iCloud backups, but some are not (or at least aren’t restored) —> make sure all Joplin settings are included in the backups and restored when needed, in order to be consistent with iCloud backups principles (see my first post) ? I made a feature request for this, even though I think it’s more of a bug

  • Notes data might be included in iCloud backups (according to backup sizes) but isn’t restored anyway —> either remove it from the backups or make sure it is restored when appropriate, in order to be consistent ?