Changing note type, for only one Card type

Anki Card Design
1

Apologies if this is a duplicate question, I’ve been having trouble putting my issue into the precise terminology that might yield a good Google search.

In any case, I’m thinking of making a change to one of my more-established decks and want to make sure I know what I’m doing before I go botching hundreds of cards.

Background

So I’ve got a running US Presidents deck with fields

  • Name
  • Photo
  • Number (e.g. Obama=44)
  • Years
  • Party
  • Undergrad and Graduate education
  • Military Branch
  • Birth State
  • First Lady name
  • Work History (e.g. Wilson was president of Princeton University and governor of New Jersey)

I’ve got a ton of card types built on top of this deck:

  1. Name → Years
  2. Years → Name
  3. Name → Number
  4. Number → Name
  5. Name → Party
  6. Photo → Name
  7. Name → Education
  8. Name → Birth State
  9. Name → Service Record
  10. Name → Work History

And this week, I (finally) took the plunge and discovered the majesty of Cloze cards. However in so doing, I realized that Work History would be much better suited as a Cloze card. For example, my Nixon card reads

VP: Eisenhower

Senator: California
Representative: California

Navy Officer: Commander

Lawyer

I’d be better-off testing my recall of each individual fact, as opposed to trying to do them all in one go.

My Question

I wanted to change my “Work History” cards into Cloze. However, as they’re a subset of the US Presidents Note Type, I don’t think I can just filter down to "note:US Presidents" card:9, select all, right-click, “Change Note Type.” When I do that, I’m greeted with this prompt, which leads me to believe I’m one click away from unwittingly nuking the rest of my deck

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And so my questions:

  1. Am I correct in my caution here? Is this about to blow away all of my other cards?
  2. Assuming I am, then I have to make 45 new Cloze cards from existing information. Is there a streamlined way to do this? Or do I have a lot of copy/paste in my future
  3. Suppose I had clicked OK on this prompt. What’s the best way to undo my blunder and recover my cards to the state they were in when I sat down this morning?

Thanks!

2

Change note type operates on the note and all its cards - it is not possible to split off a single card into a separate note type. You can export the cards into a text file, and import them back into a separate note type if you wish. If you make a mistake and did not export a backup prior to starting, you may be able to recover from an automatic backup. https://faqs.ankiweb.net/restoring-an-automatic-backup-recovering-from-data-loss.html

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