I recently installed Joplin. My setup includes 2 Android devices and 2 Windows 11 devices, with about a dozen notebooks and roughly 30 notes. Synchronization is via WebDAV, and the total data size on the WebDAV server is 60 MB.
I accidentally noticed that the data is not syncing completely.
On one of my Windows 11 devices, synchronization takes an unusually long time—sometimes up to an hour.
As a result:
Notebooks are not being created.
Notebooks are not being deleted.
Notebooks are not being moved to other categories.
Some notes are not attributed to any notebook, but they do appear in the "All Notes" list. These notes may sync partially.
There are no conflict notifications.
I couldn’t find any diagnostic tools for synchronization other than a text report, which doesn’t provide any meaningful information.
Is the problem that the first time you synced a device it takes a long time to sync, or you had Joplin running on the device already and then all of sudden it took a long time to sync?
How long ago did you install Joplin on the problematic device(s)? Also, is your webdav server accessible from the internet or only on your local network?
If after the initial sync completes, sync is then quick, I wouldn’t worry about it to be honest, as it’s known that the initial sync can take a long time. But if slow sync is persistent or does not complete even when left for hours / days, then obviously that is an issue.
To answer your question about diagnostic tools. There is the log, debug report and sync report available for diagnosis. But unless you understand the code or try to reverse engineer it, you’re best off posting the log (generally more helpful than the 2 reports) and asking for support here on the forum to attempt to diagnose the issue.
Thank you for your detailed response. To be honest, I didn’t bother investigating the synchronization issues—I simply deleted everything on the server, created new profiles on the Windows devices, and restored the data from a backup. Strangely, synchronization didn’t work correctly with the default profiles even after clearing the server data. After creating new profiles, synchronization started working quickly and correctly.
What really concerns me is that I discovered the problem by accident.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any diagnostic tools to understand what exactly went wrong. So, if I had a lot of notes, I might have found out about the issue too late, and it would have been difficult to determine which device had the most up-to-date version of a note.
To be honest its usually easier just to clear everything and start again when something like that happens. But yeah creating a new profile is important as reusing an existing profile can persist various data which may have been causing issues.
In terms of working out which device has everything, what could help is looking on the ‘sync status’ screen, which is in the help menu I think on the desktop app, as it also available on the mobile app. The sync status screen tells you how many local objects there are of various categories, and whether they are all uploaded. It will also have warnings there for items which could not be synced, if it is due to a persistent error for particular objects. You can compare the figures in the sync summary across your devices