Operating system
Android
Joplin version
3.5.8
Sync target
Joplin Cloud
Editor
Markdown Editor
What issue do you have?
I've just realized that Joplin is overriding existing notes with unrelated content, with the title and content of notes created via sharing. I'm hoping for some suggestions into how I can find out which notes this has affected, instead of going through hundreds of note's previous versions to find them. (This likely goes back a year, see Sharing a webpage creates multiple notes from April 2025)
While I suspect that if I want to find these notes I need to use (1) brute force to go through many hundreds of notes' version history to check the notes (2) accept that some notes that I created as reference for projects have simply been lost, I am hoping someone has some insight into this.
Detail on what's going on
The process to figuring this out is a bit confusing (since it's a confusing situation) but here it is: While using Joplin in Android, I was looking for a note ("note a") that I created a few months ago with some important reference information. I could not find it, but I did find another note referencing it ("note b"). Oddly, when I clicked on the link in "note b" to "note a", it took me to "note c". "note c" is not at all related to "note a". The contents of "note a" were holy created in a fresh note (e.g. meeting notes), "note c" was created via the share button while using Firefox on Android. I switched over to using Joplin on (Windows) desktop and searched for the note again, in this view, I realized that "note c" was in the trash because when I clicked on it, from hyperlink in "note b", the folder that "note a" was created in displayed on the middle column (I have the Joplin displaying three sections, L to R: folders/tags, note list, and then note edit field). When I looked up "note c" by title, the note didn't exist. So I looked in the trash. There were eleven versions of note with the same title as "note c" (this bug has been going on for a year, see Sharing a webpage creates multiple notes). (I've had this issue with multiple Android web browsers and Joplin.) I restored them all and found three notes, by going through the version history, that were notes that had been overridden by the share feature. It feels like "greenfield" notes are being overtaken by the content of shared notes, and turned into "brownfield" notes. How do I find these brownfield notes to remediate and return to greenfield state? This seems like I need to find any note that I ever created by sharing something from phone (many are in the trash, as they were duplicate notes erroneously created by the system so I deleted them) and look through each of their history. This could be days of work.
edit For the benefit of someone coming across this post, who is trying to find information about notes in the Trash. While the Note Properties icon is grayed out, for notes in the Trash folder, you can still access the Properties with the same shortcut as all notes (Alt + Ctrl + P). This will allow you to see the note history, and other features, without having to Restore the note.