I really tried to find a topic in in the forum (closest I found was something related to iCloud) or an issue on GitHub -- can backups be taken from mobile devices? Not sync, but a proper backup (to JEX or anything else).
The full scenario is that I'm trying to enable syncing to WebDAV but want to take a backup of the data on the phone before hand, just in case anything goes wrong... At this point I realized that I don't see an option to backup on iOS like on desktop...
I'm in the exact same situation. Sorry to post a reply without an answer, but it can be important to let others know it's a common issue for other users. It's also a way to keep track of this question...
So we have to make a new sync to any cloud service and that will act as a backup, right? It'll not "understand" as an empty folder and then delete everything locally on the phone (as mentioned in the FAQ | Joplin)?
Well, I just did and can confirm: create an empty folder on (let's say) nextcloud and sync the app using it, will delete all of your local files as it understands that if nothing is in the remote folder, it was delete and has to be deleted locally. So the question remains: how to change the WebDAV URL on mobile app without losing everything we have on the phone?
In general you just copy everything manually from your (mobile or not) profile folder to the sync target before the first sync, maintaining folder structure etc. This should work from Android too (since you have access to the file system), but not from iOS. I am afraid the iOS app is not the ideal start for using Joplin.
Thanks for the input everyone, was really wondering if I somehow missed something somewhere.
Since Joplin is F/OSS software I guess this feature will be there when someone decides to implement it! Copying everything manually doesn't feel like a great solution but I essentially did that (and did a bunch of sharing), but it could be streamlined -- just waiting for someone to write the code.
Note that this is a pretty well known limitation, it's unfortunate but until the code changes (or a new feature that does what everyone is expecting) comes out then it will probably stay that way.
I'm actually going to be releasing in the near future a cloud service that backs joplin (offering WebDAV and joplin-server based sync) that will try and mitigate this but right now what I'm looking at is just making it possible to essentially pull all the files (at one point in time, anyway) from a given WebDAV source -- so basically a WebDAV general backup solution, applied to the WebDAV you were using. Along with that, for export (so you can easily move to another WebDAV hoster) I'm looking to build something that spits out zip files and can also try to transfer files directly.
One more unfortunate thing (AFAIK) is that right now Joplin doesn't support subdirectories natively, but this can be mitigated I think by making sure that the web-dav end gives different people different folders (AFAIK two different Joplin instances pointed at https://webdav.provider.com/bob and https://webdav.provider.com/aliceshould not collide with each other). Unfortunately I don't have this functionality yet (right now 1 webdav sync location = 1 user) but it would be easy to set up and would certainly make the product a lot more cost-effective for people. Wondering if I should add this before launch.
In the latest pre-release version (at least on desktop) there's an advanced option to force reuploading your notes to the server, this should be ideal when changing sync targets.
If you end up using it, back up your notes first, as always.
