Accidental deck deletion and sync - Need data restore⁠

Anki Syncing & AnkiWeb
1

I accidentally deleted my deck and synchronized. I have lost all local backups. Is it possible to restore my collection to a snapshot from 11 June 2026 ?

I have my AnkiWeb account email ready, please let me know how I can provide it to you securely (e.g., via private message).

Thanks you !

4

I can see the email address you used to post here. If your AnkiWeb account is associated with a different address, please add it here (to your account in the Forum) as an alternate/secondary address.

Your local automatic backups are hard to lose – Restoring an Automatic Backup (Recovering from Data Loss) - Anki FAQs . Have you checked there?

The next place to check would be your Deletion Log – Backups - Anki Manual .

5

I have added my AnkiWeb email to my forum account preferences.

Regarding your suggestions: I have double-checked the ⁠backups⁠ folder and the deletion log, but unfortunately, they are empty/do not contain the data from before the deletion. I am still unable to find any local files.

Since I have synchronized the deletion, my AnkiWeb account is currently empty…

Is there any possibility to restore my collection from a server-side snapshot ?

Thanks you !

6

I still see just the primary address that I saw initially – an icloud.com email address. Is that the one? The AnkiWeb account for that address isn’t empty.

It’s not possible to delete those from inside the app by deleting a deck. So either you’re not looking in the right place, or you deleted something some other way.

7

Thank you for your patience. I apologize for the confusion regarding my email addresses. My AnkiWeb sync email is the same as the one I am using for this forum account.

I admit that I accidentally deleted the local files/deck and then synchronized, which caused the deletion to sync to AnkiWeb as well. I have confirmed that my other decks are still present, but my ‘Kanji’ « 漢字 » deck is missing.

I am sorry for the trouble, and I am currently keeping my device offline to avoid any further accidental syncs.

8

That clears up the account, thank you.

But if you only deleted the one deck, from inside Anki, it should be there in your backups.

So, maybe you deleted your entire profile folder, from outside of Anki? But then how were you able to recover your other decks?

I’m not asking all of these questions just to bother you. I’m asking them because the answer to your main question is “no.” Server-side backups are made much less frequently than local backups, so you can’t pick a specific date to restore.

In your account, the last backup was created a few days before that – click for timestamp in your local time zone – so if I restore that version you would lose any progress you’ve made since then.

If you’re convinced that version is your only/best option to recover that deck, you can minimize data loss if you –

  1. Create a fresh (temporary) profile – Profiles - Anki Manual .
  2. Confirm that you want me to restore that older version and overwrite your AnkiWeb account. [I’ll let you know when that’s done.]
  3. Set up your temp profile to sync with your AnkiWeb account, and download from AnkiWeb.
  4. Find the missing deck and export it as APKG, with scheduling.
  5. Return to your main profile. On sync, upload to AnkiWeb to keep your more current version of your collection.
  6. Import the APKG of the missing deck, and sync again.
  7. [Clean up by deleting the temp profile.]
9

Thank you very much for the clear instructions and for your help. Losing a few days of progress is perfectly fine for me, as recovering the Kanji deck is the priority. I am ready to follow the steps you provided. Please go ahead with the restoration of that version to my AnkiWeb account. I will wait for your confirmation before creating the temporary profile and downloading from AnkiWeb.

10

That’s been restored. You can proceed.