I know the recent versions of Joplin have moved to a new encryption algorithm. I'm still on the older versions and keen to upgrade, but hesitant thinking that the new encryption could potentially cause complications and issues such as password problems, duplicates, sync problems etc and worst case no access to my notes if something goes wrong with the migration.
I've read some comments on this board about it but overall I'm not clear on what will happen on the upgrade and what best practice is. Will all my existing notes become re-encrypted or just the new ones use the new algo? Can I be sure I'll be able to access everything going forward? Will I end up with a lot of dupes that need cleaning up and need extra space on my sync target for this? Also, what is the update protocol; do I need to update all clients at the same time?
Overall I'm just worried that this all sounds potentially a bit messy! I hope I'm wrong of course and I'm sure these issues have been thought through. Perhaps someone has a link to a post or doc that'd help my understanding?
Any advice or reassurance I can be given would be much appreciated so I can have the confidence to upgrade without thinking my work/notes could be compromised.
My recollection is that only new notes will use the new encryption. If you want all notes to use the new encryption, you can go to Tools | Options | Encryption | Show Advanced Settings | click Re-encrypt data.
NOTE: Take a backup first (tools | create backup) just in case
That should re-encrypt all of your notes. If you have any devices connected using sync, when you sync them they should download all of the re-encrypted notes.
This shouldn't result in any duplicate notes (at least it didn't when I did it)
Thanks for your reply - that’s really helpful. So in theory based on what you’re saying I could just update and not do anything and automatically new notes would use the new encryption method - that’s good and sounds straightforward. That is of course as long as the old methods are supported “indefinitely” going forward.
I presume one has to update all clients at once or the old ones won’t be able to read new notes.
Final question - on the new versions can you just choose to stay with the old encryption even for new notes until such time you’re ready to move over?
Yes, my recollection is that if you update all clients (and don't manually re-encrypt all notes), things should just work, and only new notes will use the new encryption