I am a med student, using Anki on my laptop multiple times a day. My laptop has recently had water damage so has needed to be wiped when I have sent it in for a repair.
When I logged onto my account on AnkiWeb, it shows none of my cards (where I have made around 5000 over the last year or so). I don’t think I ever “set up” the syncing, even though I know it says it is automatic. So I am just needing help attempting to get the cards back. It seems a long shot, but I keep seeing that Anki automatically synchronises the cards to the cloud but this doesn’t seem to have worked for me?
I don’t have access to my laptop at the moment, because otherwise I would do all the things it suggests in the “Backups” page on AnkiWeb- should I just wait until I can access my Anki through my laptop?
I’m really keen to restore my Anki so please help if you can.
Thank you
Simply having an AnkiWeb account isn’t enough. You needed to set up syncing in Anki to tell your Anki install what account to sync with. (Once you do that, by default it will sync automatically when you open and close.) If you never did that, you’ve never synced, and AnkiWeb doesn’t have a copy of your collection.
By “wiped,” do you mean that you deleted everything on your laptop hard drive? Did you make any copies of your data first (specifically, the Anki2 data folder is what you need)?
I’m sorry to say, but if you don’t have copies or backups, it sounds like your collection is gone.
Beat the bushes and check everywhere though! Did you have anything running on your system that backed up important files to cloud storage, and was your Anki2 folder included in that? Have you ever exported your collection to share it with someone else, maybe by email or on a shared drive? Even if that version doesn’t have your review history, you’d still be able to recover the notes/cards you had at that time.