I am writing to urgently request help regarding my AnkiWeb account associated with this email address.
Due to being logged out for the past several months, I was completely unable to access my account or check my emails. I just logged in today and realized that I received a 30-day account expiry warning email, which unfortunately expired just yesterday. My AnkiWeb account is now entirely empty.
I have spent literally several hundred hours meticulously building custom decks on this account.
Since the deletion occurred only a couple of days ago, I am desperately hoping that a recent server snapshot or backup might still exist in your system.
Could an administrator please check if it is possible to restore my collection from a recent server backup? I would be incredibly grateful for any help you can provide to salvage this work.
I had no idea that Anki would delete files with such a short warning. I’m hoping that all my hard work isn’t lost.
Yes, the data was removed from your account after it had been inactive for at least 6 months. We delete the data from accounts in our system that aren’t being used for syncing or studying, so AnkiWeb isn’t suitable for long-term storage of your inactive collection – AnkiWeb account removal - Anki FAQs .
However that policy only affects the data on our servers. If you still have a local copy of your collection on any devices where you used Anki / AnkiMobile / AnkiDroid, you can upload your collection to AnkiWeb and resume syncing.
Generally when data is removed from an account, that includes the server-side backups. However there is one that was retained in your account – from January 2026. [Just like a local automatic backup, that does not include any media attached to your collection.] I expect that version of your collection is older than whatever you have on your device(s), but if you want me to restore it to your AnkiWeb account, please confirm.
Other things you can do right now –
Make sure the email address you’re using for your AnkiWeb account is one that you have permanent access to. If you lose touch with that email, you won’t get important emails from us – like notification that your data is pending deletion. And if you can’t re-verify your email address annually, you might not be able to access AnkiWeb at all.
If you know you’re going to take a long break from studying, you can create your own COLPKG backup of your collection and store that in a separate place (e.g., another device, a cloud storage account).