So 316 of my cards suddenly have missing media. I don’t know what caused this and the media is also missing from ankiweb and ankidroid.
the way i create my cards is by cloze deletion and an image on the back from the page i made the cloze deletion from. i screenshot the image on macos then paste it into the back/extra field.
if it is not possible to restore the media i would like help with identifying what caused this so it doesn’t happen again
One last thing I use ankidroid and the media wasn’t missing before not sure when but I mentioned this because the media was definitely on ankiweb so its weird that it was deleted/missing
if there is any information that I missed please ask me so I can edit this post
Yeah I just found that out today, thankfully it’s only 70 images so I should be able to get it back if a spend a day fixing it. but sadly this happened 3 days before my exam so I won’t be doing that any time soon.
What I want to know now is what caused this and how to prevent it in the future.
Perhaps the problem was due to the initial incomplete syncing?
From the title bar, i can see the first image is probably a windows or linux machine, and by the last image with the Check for missing media, the title bar appears to be from a macOS machine (or a themed linux machine).
Can you clarify the devices you use with this User Profile, and the one where you initially made the images?
Syncing is likely the issue. For instance if you’ve been carrying that extra 3GB of unnecessary media from device to device, the media you wanted might be waiting behind that for syching. You did good thing by deleting that (and you can “Empty Trash” go be fully rid of that as soon as you’re ready).
It does seem like you’ve got a number of devices that you’re syncing, so be sure you’re syncing when you open the app, and when you close/leave the app, on every device, every time. If your devices have gotten out of sync, they won’t all be in sync until you sync all of them and then sync again on whichever one you did first.
If you run Check Media on your different devices and you’re getting different results. Keep syncing and see if they change.
Contrary to what was said above, it is sometimes possible to recover deleted media on the server side, but first lets make sure it’s actually missing.
Yeah i used to have the anking deck so i realised i don’t need to use it now so i just deleted it yesterday
On my mac and ankidroid the media is still missing i also opened anki web and it also wasn’t there.
The only device i use other than my mac is ankidroid I think there isn’t a check media on it and i remember seeing some of the missing media which leads me to beleave that it was synced but not 100% hopefully its a media syncing issue like you’ve said
I also have one more question did anki delete the missing media from my mac or was it deleted because it was a screenshot so it gets deleted after a period of time
There is! 3-dots menu > Check > Check Media. Comparing that result to the others will be very helpful.
Then that’s the mostly likely to be out of date with syncing.
No, Anki doesn’t delete your media for you. And as long as you attach the file to your note, Anki keeps its own copy of the file – it doesn’t matter if the original gets cleaned up.
Also on your last point you said that it wasn’t possible for anki to delete media on its own this makes the situation more confusing because since making the cards (on the same device) till today i haven’t deleted any decks or reinstalled anki so im not sure how it went missing
How long ago did the media go missing? I can restore media that was recently deleted from your AnkiWeb account, but it’s sort of an all-or-nothing thing, so the narrower the timeframe, the better. It’s also likely to bring that 3GB of unnecessary media with it, so you’ll have to download that to make sure the missing files are back, before you’ll be able to delete it again.
Please confirm if you want me to do that, and for what timeframe.
Okay, I restored all the media files that were recently deleted from your AnkiWeb account. They’ll automatically download on the next sync.
When you take a look at them, check to make sure none of them have nearly the same name as your missing files, just in case it’s a filename issue that allowed them to get deleted.
So i found the missing media turns out it was a linking problem the media isn’t linked to the card and i don’t know how to fix this
Since it wasn’t linked to the card its considered unused media so i went to manually delete the th other 3gb of data while keeping the media i want after doing this though i keep getting an error when syncing on every device that says if the this error repeats itself i should make a post on this forum
I have tried deleting the media from ankiweb since when syncing only the collection (without media) i get this error butevery time i delete it and then force sync (upload to ankiweb) it just redownloads it
There was one way i could delete some of it it was by syncing and using check media>delete unused over and over during the syncing process but this made delete most of it but i still have 58 mb of extra data that won"t get delete
Oh and even after all this i am still getting this error
Even though media files on my mac and ankidroid or the same i think 958? For both of them
Tl:dr
I have a syncing error that wont go away
Images that i thought were missing weren’t but they Aren’t linked to their flashcards anymore(couldn’t find them before because i had 30k files)(and it was a pain to find them used 7 scripts in the terminal)
I’m glad you have the files! That should make it easy to solve the “media linked to notes” issue first.
Find one of those notes that should have an image.
What is in the HTML view (click < > above the field) of that field? The exact text is important, start to finish, so put it between `backticks` (as preformatted/codeblock text) so the Forum doesn’t eat up any of the characters.
What is the exact name of the file that goes with that?
I don’t think I understand exactly what your sequence was with Check Media and syncing – but the easiest thing you can do is copy those 70 files you want to somewhere safe, then use check media to delete unused, and then you can put those 70 files back in your collection.media folder.
I suspect Anki is restoring the media for you because you weren’t fully in sync with the server when you started deleting it. If all of your devices are in sync, and then you delete the media on one, the deletion should sync.
Thanks for the explanation i already stored the media in a safe place
But the problem with syncing is that i cant sync it fully so it won’t delete anything i don’ have my mac now so i can’t paste the error but it happens every time what i remember is it didn’t have any error code just said if the reoccurs to post on the forums for help
Tried the check database thing and still getting the same error. Is it possible to delete all media on anki web without syncing?
Also is there an easier way to link them or do i have to do it manually i have been using anki for years but this the first time i faced a problem like this
