Understanding storage use in Joplin: a few different numbers

Lounge
1

I find different indications of how much storage is used by content in Joplin.

iOS: Settings -> General -> Storage -> Joplin

Documents & Data reads at 6.82 GB.

MacOS: navigate to Joplin ~/.config/joplin-desktop

Directory is 9.19 GB.

  • Sans the log file coming in at 2.09 GB, that leaves 7.1 GB. Pretty close to the storage used on iOS.

JEX export

Reads 1.8 GB.

  • Is the JEX tar compressed? I hadn't realized compression was done for JEX exports. In that case, a phenomenal compression ratio.
  • I believe orphan items from the resources directory are excluded from the export. I wonder how much storage is saved by this.
2

JEX is a tar file but tarballs are not compressed archives. Could the smaller size be because the JEX file does not contain historic note versions and their associated resources (if they are not also being used by current notes)?

3

I couldn't say. I'll find out. It's time to clean out the unused resources and note history.

5

I suspect yes. While attempting to clean Joplin Cloud, I ran into issues.

Used a first-party plugin intended to clean sync target to which user doesn't have filesystem access. Not realizing that the plugin cleans Notes, Folders, Resources, and Tags, but not NoteTags, Master Keys, and Revisions.

Then created a new Master Password, which generated a new Master Key. As old Master Keys remained on Cloud, sync returned the old Master Keys to my client. Sync also added the new Master Key to the growing collection of Keys on Cloud. Now there are old Master Keys requiring the old Master Password. And a new Master Key requiring the new Master Password. And as far as I can tell, I can't do in Joplin Cloud the equivalent of rm -rf <sync-target>, so I'm stuck with all of them :sweat_smile:

Long story short, I haven't yet been able to see what Cloud storage use would look like after a clean upload.