Need advice on how to do a complete backup

How do you guys do a complete backup of all notebook and notes (with images) ?

Admittedly I have not tried this. I figure Dropbox makes backups. However, if you select File/Export and use JEX, that should include everything. RAW would be the next option.

what would RAW do? also everything as in like with pics too?

I checked my local folder on my PC: Dropbox/Apps/Joplin/.resource has the pictures.

@tony You’d have to try it. Or simply copy the Dropbox/Apps/Joplin/ folders from Dropbox or wherever you have your sync set.
My understanding is JEX is a Joplin format, and RAW is universal.

jex is the way to go. If you loose your data or ever have to start over, then importing a jex archive file will restore all your notebooks, notes, tags, pictures etc exactly as things were at the time you made the backup. Good to routinely back up to a jex archive to ensure you can recover from disaster :slight_smile:

Hope that helps


If you install the terminal version of Joplin you can create a script to run backups periodically, the key line might be something like this for a bash script
joplin export --format jex backup-location-path/$(date +"%Y-%m-%d-%H:%M")

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They are basically the same. The JEX file is nothing more than a tar zipped version of the RAW data.
The official way to do a backup is Export -> JEX.

Isn’t copy of everything under “profile” (including sqlite file and resources sub-directory) a viable option?
If yes, I see it as easiest option for beginners.
(Of course, copy files when Joplin is not running)

It's not a good idea as that will also copy the sync state, which normally you don't want to restore in case of a problem.

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Ups, didn’t consider it.
Is this sync state kept in db or in some flat file(s) that could be excluded?

It’s in the db. Ideally we’d have two files - a “.ini” or similar for settings and one for application state, but at the moment it’s all in the same sqlite database.