Synchronization Deleted most of my Notes

[personalizedrefriger]

@joplinuser47

So my question is: Is there anything i can do to retrieve all the notes i collected in the last 18 months or are they gone forever?

Even with older versions of Joplin, it may be possible to recover recently deleted items from the database.

This requires the sqlite3 command and a Joplin profile in ~/.config/joplin-desktop/.

From a terminal:

1. Important: Create a backup of the Joplin profile directory

   bash$ cp -r ~/.config/joplin-desktop/ ~/.config/joplin-desktop.backup/
   

2. Open the Joplin profile directory.

   bash$ cd ~/.config/joplin-desktop/
   

3. Make a copy of the database:

   bash$ cp ./database.sqlite ./db-copy.sqlite
   

4. If Joplin is running, fully quit Joplin.
5. Run the SQLite3 recovery tool (see the relevant SQLite documentation):

   bash$ sqlite3 db-copy.sqlite ".recover --ignore-freelist" > recovered.sql
   

6. Inspect recovered.sql. Some of the INSERT INTO queries may include text from the deleted items.
7. Either:
   • Manually copy/paste the deleted items from recovered.sql into a new location or,
   • Attempt to reconstruct the database:

     bash$ sqlite3 recovered.sqlite <recovered.sql
     bash$ mv database.sqlite database.old.sqlite && mv recovered.sqlite database.sqlite
     

     Then start Joplin.