Sync with WebDAV Using Microsoft IIS Webserver

czmyt · 2024-05-05T18:46:09.007Z

I'm really happy to have gotten Joplin to sync between Windows and Android devices using the WebDAV features built into Microsoft IIS. After trying to sync via filesystem and OneDrive with various problems, I think using IIS will work really well. Filesystem was working well until I started clipping webpages and my note collection exceeded 10,000 items. At that point, the Windows clients still worked well, but my Android phone was very slow to sync (one item every five seconds). I also tried syncing over OneDrive but found it to be slow; I did not like the rate limiting imposed by OneDrive which interfered with the initial syncs; and I did not like having to use the Joplin encryption features that impose too much processing and storage overhead.

So, I finally got IIS working after a bit of experimentation! Right now, it's a proof of concept because it's running on my local network and it's not yet secure. I need to figure out how to make it secure so that it could potentially be exposed to the Internet, though personally, I'll probably use a VPN when accessing it over the Internet. I really appreciate not having to use Joplin's built-in encryption, and I really appreciate that the Android sync is not made very slow by having to deal with 40,000 files in two folders. I don't know if it's the Android filesystem (on my Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra) or the way that Joplin interacts with the filesystem that makes it unacceptably slow when dealing with large collections of notes.

I'll perfect the IIS configuration and post simple instructions in the future.

Also, in the sync documentation, it says that nginx is known to work for syncing notes. I'm guessing that's probably true, but it's not easy to get setup unless you're a software developer with particular build experience. Basically, not easy to get to nginx to work out-of-the-box, and probably impossible for anyone without some serious computer knowledge. It was too complicated for me.

LeoW · 2024-05-06T01:42:00.006Z

If you would like to access your web server that you have at home from other places and do so securely, I would look into a company called tailscale.com.

They have a free tier that I use that gives you as many devices as you have up to 100 and up to three user accounts which is two more than you'll need.

With a free login you install the software on your server and on your phone and any other computers you have and it will create a private tail scale network that they call a tail net and all of your computers will be assigned a private IP address accessible only by other computers logged into your account.

This is how I access my network attached storage server from away from home.
You should be able to do the same.

czmyt · 2024-05-06T04:54:32.446Z

Thanks for the recommendation. That looks very interesting. I'll look at it further. I would like a nice peer-to-peer type VPN. I've used OpenVPN in the past, but not completely happy with its features and ease of use.