I have Joplin installed on multiple PCs. I sync with Dropbox. I have a huge note database (>5 GB). Recently I installed Joplin on a new Windows 11 laptop. It synced with Dropbox and everything seemed to be fine. Then a couple of days later I synced Joplin on that laptop, and it decides to start "updating remote items" on ALL my ~7000 notes (at a very slow pace). I haven't changed any notes. Not only is this a problem in and of itself, but I then I have to go to every other PC with Joplin installed and sync, because they were no longer up to date (they needed to pull the "updates" coming from that laptop).
So I stopped whatever it was Joplin was doing and just reinstalled Joplin on the laptop and did a full initial resync. It seemed to be working fine again at that point. That was a week ago.
Now this morning, I opened Joplin on that laptop, and again it decided to start updating all notes. Just like last time. What is going on?? As I have a huge notes database, this is an extremely maddening and time consuming process, as you can imagine. Can someone please tell me why Joplin would keep doing this??
I can't think of anything that could make the Dropbox sync do this. Maybe some issue with your computer's clock? Is the time correct? or did you recently change your timezone? (although normally that shouldn't be a problem)
Your plugins seem fine. I don't assume you have an external app that maybe be processing your notes?
Thanks for replying. The clock is set to the correct date & time. And no, I don't have any external app processing my notes.
It's just that one laptop which has ever manifested this problem. I don't understand why, since all I did was install Joplin, disable backups, link it to Dropbox, and do a full initial sync. Same as I do on all my PCs.
At this point, short of uninstalling Dropbox on that laptop and never using it there again, all I can do is let it finish, which will take multiple hours, after which I need to go and sync about 5-6 other PCs, each of which need to "update" the 7000 or so notes that the laptop updated. Thankfully, those at least can be done simultaneously. Also, since I don't know the cause, I don't know if the laptop will one day decide to do this again, necessitating a repeat of this entire process!
Update: after 6 hours, it had "updated" about 10k remote items, and checking the sync status page, it looks like I have over 40K items in total, and I didn't have the time to wait another 18 hours for it to finish, so I just uninstalled Joplin from that laptop.
Then I had to go through about 8 other devices and sync so they could receive these phantom updates and be "up to date". Unfortunately, I could not update them all in parallel, since Dropbox would start throttling my requests. I was able to run about 2 devices simultaneously, and each full sync took about 2-3 hours. What a nightmare this whole process has been. The worst part is that now I'm afraid to install a fresh copy of Joplin on other PCs/devices, not knowing if that Joplin install will go nuts again and start "updating remote items" out of nowhere for no reason.
On that note, is there a way to run Joplin in some sort of "live" mode, where it doesn't try to download the full note library, but is able to read notes on demand? Something like where it just gets all the titles, and then clicking on a note loads it? Many commercials products do something like that.
There isn't a feature like that. However if your devices are all PCs (no mobile devices) then you can avoid having to do a full sync on every device if you transfer the ~/.config/joplin-desktop folder to each device after you have synced one device. Just make sure Joplin is fully closed both when copying the original folder and on the new pc when you transfer it.
For any mobile devices, you will have to sync them manually.
In my experience this seems to be standard sync behaviour, an initial real sync, then a follow on status check. And yes, it has also caused me problems especially on android and one particular linux installation on an old Macbook Air with only a little ram.
On the Macbook air I eventually got it installed using the Joplin cli version which may be of interest to you.
Otherwise it sounds like you may have a lot of embedded graphics in your files to get to that 5gb total weight. Question is do you really want to retain that in this format, and if not you might consider exporting the note corpus to .md format, then reimporting it into a clean profile, which is likely to be much easier to sync.