Some items cannot be synchronised

I’m using 1.0.178 as it won’t update to 1.0.179. Just ignores me when I request the update. But, that is not my issue.

I’m using Joplin with Windows 10 - and also on my phone and tablet (Samsung Galaxy Tab A 2019)

The windows version and the phone seem perfect. However some time ago I started getting the “some items cannot be synchronised” message on my tablet. It complained that 2 items were more than 10 mb and therefore they would stay on my tablet but not be “uploaded to the sync target”.

I found the two notes that had those 2 large linked items (a pdf file and a gif). I really didn’t want to spend that much space on those two notes, so I deleted the notes that used them in Windows Joplin. I cannot find them on my windows computer. I cannot find them on my tablet. My phone never complained. However, the error message remains and tells me to click for more information. Then it lists those two files as being too big. Joplin always has a big orange band on top about how items can’t be synchronised. But, neither the notes that called those resources nor the resources themselves appear in either Dropbox or Joplin.

On Android, does Joplin only store data in the dropbox folder, or is it also somewhere I’ve not been able to find?

Any ideas?

If the solution is to re-install, would I on my tablet:

  1. uninstall Joplin
  2. delete the joplin app folder in Dropbox
  3. Install joplin and sync to my dropbox account.

Hey, @SteveShank. First things first, here’s the update page. There was a bug that prohibited updating from the app that was fixed in this latest release.

So, to answer your question about how Joplin saves files: it doesn’t truly save anything to your hard drive that would be very useful to you without you messing with its SQL database and pretty much reverse engineering how it creates each file. The majority of your notes won’t be human readable and when you delete notes from your desktop, unless you backed up your entire notebook in one of the Export formats, you’ve almost certainly removed those notes and assets forever.

Joplin is very much cloud based with no real focus on local saves like a traditional note taking app might do. It’s designed that way to make it capable of being used on multiple devices and backed up in a more stable, safe way than keeping it locally.

The 10 MB file issue is a common problem, as acknowledged on the main page in the section titled Known Bugs. Any asset that is 10 MB or larger are known to crash the mobile apps due to possible hardware limitations, and it’s not recommended to attach anything that large to any note or to do for that reason.

I hope I hope answered most of your questions. If you have anymore, feel free to reply.

Thanks for attempting to help, but really you didn’t address my issue. I deleted the files from Windows. I wouldn’t have saved those notes had I checked how big they were. They appear to be gone. No orphans remained. My phone seems fine. I synced. My tablet continued to give me an error until after I wrote the original post. So for a few days despite my not being able to find the files, and restarting the device.

Now (after your post), the error message no longer nags me.

So, best guess, is the error occurred, but the checking for whether the error gets fixed is periodic and may take a few days to recognize that the error is no more.

I brought this up a while back.

Are we saying that the only way to suppress this warning message is to delete any large attachments?

Looking in my resources folder, I've got 22 attachments over 10MB. So the solutions are:

  1. Ignore the 10mm or so thick bright orange banner at the top of the app.
  2. Either a) restrict attachment sizes to < 10MB or b) manually delete any large attachments.

I have had the attachment setting on as auto and manual with the attachments not downloading onto the phone anyhow, so wouldn't it be simpler to have the message show up on the notes that have these larger attachments and allow us the freedom to choose what we want to save onto our notes without having an annoying banner with this prompt?

I have that annoying orange banner as well (on iOS), and can't find a way to get rid of it. I have deleted some of the notes on the desktop app that were causing the sync issue, but the banner remains.. very annoying.

I'm having this issue, i've since deleted the file it was moaning about but the banner is still showing. Is there any way for it to clear it's cache or whatever it checks for this, its quite annoying. There seems to be no dismiss button either

Did you try restarting the app? There's a bug with this banner - it doesn't clear when it should, but restarting the app should work.

In the end I wiped the database (found here: Where does Windows desktop app store files?) and resynced.

Restarting the app alone didn't fix it