Conflict between AnkiWeb Decks and AnkiDroid Decks

Anki Help
1

So I’m having this issue where an old deck and my new anki deck are in conflict with each other and I can’t have them imported onto my AnkiWeb desktop app at the same time.

To start, I had some old cards on my phone that did not get deleted when my AnkiWeb account got cleared. I synced AnkiWeb on my laptop, and that deleted my old cards from there. So when I started creating new decks on my laptop and imported a deck from AnkiHub, since I recently started school again, I go to check my phone and there were my old cards. It says there’s a conflict between the old ones and the new ones, so I export the new ones to my desktop, upload the old ones to AnkiWeb, and download the old ones to my AnkiWeb app. But whenever I try to import the new ones, it says it will delete my existing collection and replace the data with the imported stuff.

I made sure I was on the latest version of AnkiWeb and AnkiDroid (I uninstalled and reinstalled AnkiDroid to be sure) and checked the database on both sets of cards, and still nothing works. Nothing enables me to have both my old cards and my new cards together.

I would love some help here since I spent over 8 years making the old cards and I don’t want to lose them. But I have a bunch of new stuff I will need to use for school and extra decks I found online that I want to sync with my stuff. Can anyone help out, please? Thank you!

2

It sounds like you made a COLPKG export, which is an entire collection and can’t be added to an existing collection.

This is totally fixable, but I don’t want to say the wrong thing, so first I need you to clearly state which collection (old or new) is in which place – between the desktop app, AnkiWeb account, AnkiDroid app, and export file you made?

3

Ah, that explains it! I actually have COLPKG versions of both the old and new cards on my laptop right now, and I’m saving the old version as an ANKI deck, rather than an ANKI collection. I figure I can load up the new cards after I save the old ones in the other file format, save the new cards in the same file format, and then combine the two once they’re in Anki Decks.

I have the new ANKI cards in my AnkiWeb and I’ve been cycling between the two for ages. But I have both versions saved to my desktop as COLPKG and Anki Deck formats now.

4

Update: it was the file format that did it! Once I exported the collections as Anki Deck package (.apkg) instead of an anki collections package (.colpkg), and I was able to import them together and combine my old and new card collections! Thank you again SO MUCH Danika! It was driving me CRAZY for hours just cycling through both batches and wondering what on earth was going on! You saved me a lot of headache, and I really appreciate you!