This depends on whether the data was encrypted or not. Nowadays, many new Windows devices come with BitLocker turned on by default. In that case, there is no way to access or recover your data without the user account password. However, if it was not encrypted, then resetting just the Windows password and accessing the data this way is trivial.

I don't think this will actually delete your Joplin data from the device. The reason is that Joplin syncs with Dropbox communicating with the API directly, meaning that the Dropbox files themselves don't need to be present on the disk.

I think your only try may be to use another device to make a local Joplin backup first, then delete all notes locally, then use the "Re-upload local data to sync target" button in the Joplin desktop application to overwrite the remote state with empty one. In this situation, once Joplin on the stolen laptop connects to the network and tries to perform sync, it should delete all local notes. You also must not use the same Dropbox account to sync new notes after doing so.

Please keep in mind though that there are ways to restore both deleted notes inside Joplin, and also just deleted files from the disk, so in sum, unless the device was encrypted, I'd say that you can safely assume that the people who have stolen the laptop will indeed have access to all your notes and there is nothing that can be done to prevent them from doing so if they really want to.

3 Likes