Computer hard drive broke and lost all anki flaschards

My macbook’s hard drive recently crashed and I lost all my application data as a result (i.e. losing all my anki cards). I had made no back-ups of my application data on another hard-drive, and iCloud also had not automatically saved it.

After getting a new hard drive and OS system, I re-downloaded Anki but clicked ‘download’ instead of ‘upload’ after logging into my account, and I believe that deleted all my cards. No decks are currently displayed on my ankiweb account. Since I have no available back-ups, I cannot manually restore the cards either. Is there anyway to restore my data from any previous days, from Anki’s own server?

if you didn’t sync with your ankiweb account and lost all the data, there’s no way to restore it

I did sync with my ankiweb account but my decks aren’t appearing now because I had clicked ‘download’ instead of ‘download’ (instead of ‘upload’) when I downloaded Anki again (the application itself). I was hoping there’d be a back up on Anki’s server

I think you mean the other way around. If you had clicked “Download”, your AnkiWeb data would now be on your system and still available on AnkiWeb’s server.

If you haven’t already, try logging in to AnkiWeb, maybe your data is still there?

If it isn’t, not all hope is lost though. I’ve seen @dae restore lost user data from his server in the past. But I don’t think this would apply to your media (sounds & images) - just the collection.

This was so helpful, thank you! My decks have also disappeared from ankiweb so I’m really hoping there’s a copy of the lost data on the server. Is there a reason why it doesn’t apply to media?

I’m afraid your account does not appear to have any data or backups, and appears to have only been created recently.

I’ve just seen you posted a private message as well. Backups are only taken once a week, and I’m afraid it sounds like what happened here is you uploaded material and then accidentally overwrote it out before a backup had been made. Unfortunately it is not possible to recover anything on AnkiWeb’s end if there are no backups available.