Are there any comparisons that have been done between the various synch options?
The main thing I worry about is how slow the synch speed is. I'm synching with OneDrive, but when I follow the action on mobile or on the desktop, it kind of seems like the slowness might be linked to encryption/decryption rather than data transfer per se.
Currently my data size is around 300Mb. The times that I have had to do a full restore took hours.
Are other synch targets faster? Or is encryption the limiting factor?
The speed at which files are synced across devices is going to depend on your internet bandwidth and hard drive transfer speed. Are you syncing locally or over the internet?
You also mention syncthing in the body of your post, but OneDrive as the "Sync Target". Which are you using? OneDrive is cloud storage, you wouldn't be able to use syncthing to transfer your files to it directly. Unless you're referring tp the OneDrive folder on Windows, which is just a local folder that OneDrive syncs with.
Sync speed is affected not only by target, but by client as well. I’m syncing to selfhosted WebDAV without encryption. On desktop, sync speed is reasonable, comparable with syncing to local directory. Sync to android is considerably slower, with only a few items per second synced.
I'm syncing to a local WebDAV server on a Synology NAS and with around 5000 notes the normal sync time for a couple of changes runs about half a second. This applies to the laptop (Win11 Pro), a Surface Pro (Win 10 Pro), a "mini" PC (Win 11 Pro) and a mini PC with Linux (thanks folks!) Ubuntu. The various Android devices, phones and tablets, take 5-8 seconds for the same sync also across the local network.
I’m using Apache Tomcat for WebDAV hosting, since that’s what I’m familiar with. But many other servers should work just as well, for example Apache httpd.
Sorry about that, I read your spelling of syncing as syncthing.
I'd give Syncthing a try if I were you. It sounds like you're depending on OneDrive's servers and whatever speed they supply. Syncthing will depend solely on your network speed, etc. between devices. And, it encrypts the traffic so if that is your reason for encryption and not protection on the device itself, you won't have to encrypt.
I’m using the built in Joplin cloud sync between an iphone, Linux PC and a Windows laptop. All seems to be working fine and seamlessly. You could trial it to see if it makes a difference for you.
OneDrive had a outage a while back and stopped working. Joplin was the only thing I really used it for and I scrambled to find an alternative. I finally ended up with JoplinCloud which has been rock solid across my network. I haven’t looked back.
I stopped my OneDrive subscription last month when my Window 11 ARM VM stopped updating and OneDrive couldn’t connect any more. I’m rebuilding my Window 11 instance to see if I can copy files from SMB instead of OneDrive, but it’s more complicated.
Because it would be international news if OneDrive went out everywhere for more than a day or two.
I don’t have any problem with OneDrive per se, but a restore to a phone can take pretty much a full day. Does using JoplinCloud allow you to not need encryption? I think encryption is the slow part.
It was last year when OneDrive had a very large outage in the US. I couldn't sync between my 4 systems (3 MacOS systems and a Linux laptop). I was able to copy files from one of the Macs to my local drive, turn off sync and encryption to save local copies of my files. Copying those files to all the machines from a "known good" location kept things in sync while I evaluated options. JoplinCloud allowed me to reliably sync everything. I installed the Backup Plugin to keep local backups on my machines and login to each machine at least once a week to ensure there's a current local copy of the database on each system.
Turning on Encryption for JoplinCloud enables E2E encryption, which is different from transmitting using https/TLS connections. I still use Encryption.