I have around 1,200 notes migrated from Evernote, and I’m using Joplin on Windows 11. At first, I chose to sync with OneDrive, but the synchronization was extremely slow—it kept running for over 24 hours and still wasn’t finished. Later, I heard that Joplin Server offers faster syncing, so I set up my own Joplin Server on a VPS. However, syncing was still very slow. This time, I let it run for more than 72 hours, and it finally completed. But after that, I found that syncing on my Android phone also couldn’t finish for several days, and during the process I encountered error messages related to Joplin Server that I couldn’t resolve. So I switched to self-hosted WebDAV, and after many days it eventually synced.
I also discovered that even when both my computer and phone have finished syncing, creating a new note on my computer still takes a very, very long time to sync to my phone. Sometimes it feels like it will never sync at all, because issues frequently occur, such as the error message:
“FetchError: Response timeout while trying to fetch https://ts00.1789x9.xyz/joplin/ (over 120000ms)”. server address modified.
Can anyone suggest which synchronization method is actually the best for me? Why does every sync take several days? This really makes me lose confidence in using Joplin.
I am not an expert here - but I can tell you my experience.
I am using Linux and Android clients with a self hosted server.
I have around 2,500 notes that total around 3GB in size.
A full sync on my laptop (from a remote location through the internet) I think took around 45 minutes.
A full sync on a fast Android phone took over an hour (keeping the phone awake and on Joplin the entire time).
Update syncs are quick (5 seconds on my Android phone or Linux laptop - through the internet)
From reading on the forums here my understanding that Joplin Server is the fastest option.
Something seems wrong with either your network or your server - my database sounds larger and I sync way faster than your experience.
Unfortunately I am not qualified to help you with that - but I wanted to give you some encouragement that Joplin can work quite well with a self hosted server.
Hopefully someone with more knowledge will jump in here with some technical assistance!
I doubt it's Joplin's fault here. I have over 5000 notes on a Win11 box syncing to my own WebDAV server and if there are lots of notes to sync to my phone (say, 100) it can take over 5 seconds. The initial sync to an Android device does take a long time, over 4 hours on a slow tablet but I just leave it on "stay awake" and go to bed. It's done when I get up.
Below is my sync situation. It took several days to complete the initial sync. Then, even when I only add one or two entries, every time I sync it feels like Joplin keeps running for a long time. I didn’t measure how long, but it should be several minutes. Also, will it show something like “FetchError: Response timeout while trying to fetch ……”?
The reason its slow is because you have 42869 resources and 13234 note history entries. So you have a lot more to be synced than just 1200 notes. However I still would not expect it to take as long as it is taking for you, particularly with Joplin server. Do you use any vpn?
Maybe I changed sync solutions many times . So there are so many rubbish. Now I am using “Joplin Batch” to clean my data. I hope it is useful. However, the sync time so long is not acceptal.
no. I didn’t use VPN but my server is on foreign country. even I have 42869 items, it should not need take 48 hours for sync. While I used Evernote, it just take a few minutes.
On mobile, it downloads all attachments for all notes by default, which would be quite slow if you have a huge number of attachments. You can try going into the synchronization settings | advanced and set the attachment download setting from "always" to "auto" so they are only downloaded when you open a note