This issue still exists in Dec 2023. I installed Joplin Windows on a new laptop and it is syncing since hours. It shows that it has around 1000 notes so far, but is fetching at 9900 items now and has created around 8000 items locally. So it is not only that there are many more md files than notes on the remote server (Nextcloud in my case, Joplin notes history is 1d, Nextcloud keeps versions, but that shouldn't be visible to Joplin in any way), but it also syncs those unnecessarily to the local client machine. On the Nextcloud server you not only have thousands of unnecessary revisions, but also the versions of the notes that Nextcloud keeps on its own. This is insanity.
I can only wonder how this issue is still there, it has been 3y since the last posts. Why is this not addressed by now?
Also I feel there should be a explanation of this in the FAQ.
as this thread has been closed after a response of the forum owner, this is the only way to respond.
@laurent : I do not see what you try to say. I know the amount of files that Joplin is holding and is reporting as synced. That number is not even as high as 2000 items. Why I am missing from your response is actually responding to the issue at hand: that a lot more items are held on the server and even synced to the clients (and these are seemingly not counted in the Sync Status) - as mentioned above that is more than 9000 items. That does not seem right and people are wondering, including me. Now I am wondering even more, as this issue is not addressed, nor officially documented, and then threads that talk about this are getting closed. It looks weird.
@laurent clearly there is an issue, no matter how old the thread is. Regarding extra items: I do not use the Web Clipper, i have less than 10 tags, and note history is kept for just 1 day. Still, as someone in this thread said these extra items would be note revisions. Would you care to kindly explain why note revisions are kept around indefinitely even if the note history is as low as just 1 day?
To me it does not only make no sense, apart from significantly slowing down initial sync of devices it might also be a serious security problem if you do not want to keep hundreds of versions (or revisions) to be found later on by people who shouldn't access these (e.g. by means of a trojans, so that E2EE might not help).
People like me would expect revisions to be removed automatically after the days defined for keeping them.
I would kindly advocate not to close threads where people ask for solving a problem or at least documenting it - without addressing the concerns, as such a thing always doesn't leave a good impression to people with concerns.
If you claim that you don't know about a problem because it is not on github, I would ask you kindly to follow the discussion in this thread as there are a number of issues reported here, and those should be taken seriously, even if they have not been put into github. People have reported, if you need a note in github, maybe you could put it in based on the reports here. All the best.