Multiple syncs - Joplin from home and work

Support
1

Hi,

I discovered Joplin a week ago and have been blown away by all the features. I have already migrated from Evernote and am slowly working on moving from Onenote to Joplin.

I have a how-to question on using Joplin from home and work. Hoping that the forum will guide me towards a workable solution.

I have a set of machines at work - a Windows laptop and a separate Ubuntu desktop. At home, I mainly use a Windows laptop with Ubuntu WSL2 configured. If I add an Android phone, I effectively have 5 different machines.

At home, I can easily use Dropbox to sync between home and mobile.
Joplin (PC) <-> Dropbox <-> Joplin (Android)

The challenge is that my work configuration does not allow access to any of Dropbox, Onedrive, etc. The official supported sync client is Box which has dropped WebDav support. I can use file system sync to synchronize within office machines
Joplin (Windows) <-> Samba Filesystem Sync <-> Joplin (Linux)

The question is how can I connect these two sync mechanisms - home and work. The Samba folder at work can be copied to Box so that I can access the files at home.

If I simply use another file sync application to sync between the Dropbox and Box folders, will the notes be synced in Joplin automatically? I doubt that since there would be metadata which cannot be parsed by a simple file sync application.

The only solutions I can think of:

  1. Support two sync targets in Joplin. This is not a trivial feature
  2. Export notes from one system and import them in the other system. This is going to be a tedious process over time

Please let me know your thoughts.

Regards,
Anand

2

I know this isn’t directly answering your full post, but what kind of mobile data plan are you using for your Android phone and does your phone support tethering (or sharing its data plan with other devices)?

3

Thanks for the response. My phone has a 4G data plan and does support tethering via a WiFi hotspot. Are you suggesting to connect my work laptop to phone using tethering and access Dropbox?

If so, this can avoid VPN, firewall and proxy settings. However, I am pretty sure I am going to fall foul of IT policies. My company does take them very seriously. No access to Dropbox / Onedrive from work is a bit old fashioned but that’s what I have got to work with.

I realize that my configuration is probably a niche use case.