While experimenting and improving with different features (addons, changing notetypes etc.) of Anki, I somehow lost the history metadata step by step of a large part of the cards. They are now considered as “new” by Anki. Unfortunately I was not aware of the loss of the metadata for a long time.
I don`t want to backup to loose all the improvements.
Is there any easy way to export the cards with (!) metadata to LibreOfficeCalc/Excel, change them and then reimport them to Anki?
My idea:
Correct current cards outside Anki in Calc/Excel with cards from backup based on the card name and/or “added date” (both should be enough to identify) and import again.
Please don`t spend too much time in answering. Just give me a hint if there is any easy way for an amateur like me.
It could still work, have a look at the dialog that comes up when you change a notetype.
It asks you which field in the new notetype, will each field from the old notetype be transferred to. So as long as you know which fields you changed to what, and the contents of the fields have not changed, you could still achieve what you want.
But if you can’t: you can use a SQL Viewer, (I’ve used DB Browser for SQLite, previously) to transfer all the scheduling data from the backedup cards to the modified cards.
I don’t really know SQL well, but I got around fairly well with googling around and trying things.
You’ll have to open the Table called cards.
The id column you see on the left is unique for every card, and I think every column after the “usn” field is the scheduling information.
So you’ll have to import both databases into the viewer. (I suggest exporting the needed cards only and unzipping the apkgs, and opening the db2 files in the viewer.)
Then use sql to match the rows in both databases using their ids and then copying all the columns.
(Actually once you open them in the viewer, it’s quite possible to export them into a csv and use excel or whatever you’re comfortable with, because you’ll be working with only two tables.)