Back field of my cards not showing up

Card Design
1

A few days ago I accidentally deleted the back field on one of my card. The content for all my cards are still there but now when I click the space bar, the back appears blank.
On the browse tab, all the information on the back field is still there.
For one of my decks I managed to downgrade it to the old update so it works.
But for another deck I can’t figure it out. What should I do? I’m afraid my future cards will not work either.

2

You can probably restore a backup:
https://docs.ankiweb.net/backups.html

In any case, if the format of the back is the same in both your decks, you can reuse one deck back template and apply it to the other like this:

  1. Go to the Browser.
  2. Find one of the cards in the deck that still has the back intact.
  3. Go to Cards… in the upper area of the right section.
  4. Go to Back template.
  5. Copy all the contents.

Now go back to the browser and find a card of the deck that doesn’t work and do the same. The back template should be blank, and you can paste there the template you just copied.

1 Like
3

Thanks for your reply. I managed to fix the second dec by copying the template code.

BUT now suddenly I opened other decks to revise and the rest of my cards have changed. The back info is completely gone for all my basic cards, apart from the deck I have just fixed. Any cards I have imported are unaffected. I tried to restore my backup but this doesn’t work. I have even looked on ankiweb to see if the back of my cards are available on there but they are not. Is there a way to get these cards back?? - it is a whole year’s worth of notes!

4

Are there more backups that you can try, or was “backup” intentionally singular?

If I had this issue and knew that it was a template issue, I’d save a backup of what I currently have to a safe spot to reload when I’m done. Then I’d load all previous backups from newest to oldest until I find what I need, copy that to a text file, reload my safe backup, then paste from the text file into the affected template.

Are the notes that don’t work the same note type as those that you fixed?

When thinking of a way that notes of the same note type could have a back side that’s either working or blank, I think of inclusion guards / conditionals. For example, if your working cards have a field that’s only filled on them, and they use conditionals that use that field to generate the back side, the back side will be blank for all other cards. It’d look like this:

{{#conditional-specific-to-working-cards}}
  {{back}}
{{/conditional-specific-to-working-cards}}

Note: card:2 is a search in the browser that will usually show the reverse cards. See this manual section.

Edit:

There’s also a manual section concerning blank back sides here. It covers cards being generated despite having nothing to show on the back side.

This is the opposite of my above guess. Conditionals would fix instead of cause the issue.

You mention “basic cards”, so I feel like I’m off the mark either way.

Extra edit: fixed confusing wording

5

Ummm, strange. I am guessing the note info is still there on the browser, right?

Have you checked other backups as @stupid suggests?

It is difficult to tell what you can do since I am not sure what your templates and decks look like, so the easiest way would be restoring a backup that works.

In any case, did you maybe cut, instead of copy, the card template in step 5 of my instructions and left it blank?

Check the template of the decks that are not showing, if it is blank just paste one that works or recreate it if it is a simple one.

6

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