Silly me! Haven't been thinking about my "tech" enough, a little rusty. Somehow I erased the contents of a note, M68, on April 11th in the Joplin app on my android phone. I fired up my Windows 11 laptop, opened Joplin, and didn't think to cancel the sync! Afterwards I made a backup, I thought it was set to keep multiple backups, but it wasn't. I did some googling, and was able to use SQLiteStudio to extract the data for the last 90 days from the database.sqlite file and paste and edit it in Word. So I have recovered basically the last 90 days of updates in the note. But I am missing like the first months worth of data from the note. I would like to recover this if possible, but I don't have any Joplin backups from that time period.
In Joplin in Windows in note history in the note properties I see the previous versions, but when I select a date, it doesn't show any text, and when I recover it all I get is a blank note. Any ideas?
Unfortunately I made a new backup after I erased the note. I thought I had set it to keep multiple backups, but I was wrong. I don't know why when I try to restore a previous version of the note is that it just appears as "untitled" with no content.
I think there is a potential issue with note history normalisation here. I too have seen this issue before and have it with one of my current notes. It may be related to changing a large amount, or possibly the entire note content in one go. Because for the note that it is affecting, I replace the entire contents from a local txt file whenever I make updates to it.
I have a short note history ttl of 3 days set, but I have 3 revisions for the note currently, and for all of the revisions for this note when selected from the UI, they show the contents as completely blank. For the note in question, it is 133,087 characters long
Looking at the 3 matching entries for the note id in the revisions table of the sqlite db, I can confirm that none of the revision entries contain the full note at the relevant state in time, but they only have the recent changes
Thanks for your replies, and suggestions! I was able to recover last the 90 days of the note from sqlite. It seems like I am out of luck on the rest of the note. I'll have to be more careful in the future, multiple backups and stopping a sync if I notice an issue.