I recently was trying to add media to my deck but I overwrote my collection.media folder instead. Now a bunch of my self-made image occlusion and other images from pre–made decks are missing. I also synced it to ankiweb because I didn’t notice that the media was missing so now I fear that there’s no way for me to get the images back by myself.
I was told that the Anki staff maintain server-side backup snapshots of user media and can potentially manually restore the deleted media files directly onto my cloud account. If possible, I would love if you could restore my media images that I overwrote and are now missing.
I’ve also tried all of these things you listed in a previous post but it didn’t work:
Try all of these things first –
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If you deleted the folder/files from outside Anki – have you already checked your system’s “recycle bin” or wherever deleted files go?
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If you deleted the files from inside Anki – have you already checked your media.trash folder
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Since you have other devices synced to your account, you can also recover the media from there.
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Option A: Open the app in airplane mode so it doesn’t sync before you’re ready. Go to Settings/Preferences > Syncing – log out of AnkiWeb. Then click Sync and log in again. That should rescan your media and restore anything that was deleted.
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Option B: If you can access your collection.media folder on your other device [e.g., an Android device connected to your computer via USB], you can copy your that folder to your profile on desktop to restore it.
Prompting a rescan of media from your other device should have worked – as long as that media still existed on your other device. What happened when you tried that?
Hi, thank you for the response. I logged out and synced but the old media images still didn’t show up. For both of my devices, I already synced to ankiweb with the overwritten (the one with not all the images) collection.media folder so when I log out and sync and log in again, it just checks all the media but it doesn’t add my old media.
That’s the piece you didn’t mention. Yes, the rescan will only help if you haven’t synced the deletion to the device yet, and the media is still on that device.
I’m looking at the AnkiWeb account connected to the email address you used to post here, and there were at least 10K restorable media files deleted in the past day. That’s as high as my counter goes, but I’ll be able to tell you exactly how many once they are restored. It’s best if you don’t try to sync during the restore process.
Confirm that this is the correct AnkiWeb account, and that you’re ready for me to start restoring the files, and I’ll report back when it’s done.
That is correct, and I’ll try to refrain from syncing until you tell me it is good to do so. Thank you so much!
I’m starting the restoration now.
Sounds good, do you have an estimate on how long the restoration will take?
Approximately this long. 
The process finished and restored 43665 files – just over 4 GB of additional media.
When you sync again, that will start downloading, but it’s unlikely to finish in the first sync. Media may continue syncing in the background, or you can continue running Sync until you have it all. Use Tools > Check Media after each sync to see the “Missing” number change. When that’s done, you’ll need to do the same on all of your other devices.
After you have all devices fully in sync – now is a great chance for you to clean up unnecessary media that you’ve been storing and syncing. Even after what you deleted, you can see in your screenshot above that you still had over 7K files that you weren’t using.
Run Tools > Check Media > Delete Unused Media. At this first step, the files will just be moved to another folder, so it’s completely safe and reversible. Syncing after that will delete those files from the server and your other devices. You can wait until you’re confident that was media you didn’t need before going back to run the second step, Empty Trash.
I clicked sync multiple times and also exited and restarted anki but I dont see the missing files number change. There is also no pop up showing any media being added. It just quickly syncs and says collection sync completed…
Turns out I just needed to wait like an hour and a half and the media started to return. However, I still have 9478 missing files. Is there a way for you to know on the backend when this process will finish? and why it sporadically just updates media - will it continue doing so randomly? But in general, thank you so much for restoring my media!
There isn’t a way I can tell, but you should be able to tell by looking at the size of your collection.media. Compare –
- On AnkiWeb, at the bottom of the screen, you can see how much “Media” is currently stored on the server –
- On your computer, in your
Anki2 data folder, find the folder for your profile (“User 1” or whatever you changed the name to), and you can see how much media is currently stored in your collection.media folder.
When those match (give or take rounding), you’ll know it’s done.
Anki tries to not overload a single sync with a huge load of new files, so the default setting is to “Periodically sync media” – Preferences - Anki Manual .
It will usually at least start downloading the first time you sync, but here it needs to also rescan the entire 12GB+ of media you have in your collection to figure out what is there and what isn’t there, so it can download what you’re missing. That’s a process.
If you haven’t tended to your media very often (or ever), that could mean a lot of things. Those files might have been missing for a long time, or they might never have been added to your collection. From my side, I can tell you that there isn’t anything left that was recently deleted from the server.
When you’re sure you have everything downloaded, use “Tag Missing” in that window to apply a tag to those notes, and then search up tag:missing-media to browse around and see if that looks like something you should be concerned about.
It seems like everything is back to normal. Thank you so much for your help!
