I opened anki today and a lot of my images and audio files that i had in my decks have been lost, is there anyway to get them back through an ankiweb backup?
Thanks!
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hi, I’m not an expert but here’s what I would try to do in your situation: find the backup folder. On iOS for example, it’s in the Files app > On My Iphone > Anki > Backups. then share the backup and import the latest backup that still includes your media files back to Anki. This should duplicate all your decks. Then just delete the decks that have not been imported. Not sure if it works though. Good luck.
I just read the anki documentation and appearantly the backups do not store media unfortunately. Sorry for the false hope. Maybe there is another way.
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- Did you do something to delete them – like delete them from your
collection.mediafolder? - Did this happen on a new device that you are syncing for the first time?
- Have you run Tools > Check Media to see if those files are reported as missing?
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I changed computers so i transfered the whole anki2 folder, i’ve done it like that other times when i format my computer and never had an issue.
Yep they are reported as missing
If you copied the entire Anki2 directory, you have everything that you had before.
- Are those specific files reported as missing in the list?
- What’s going on with those 2 subfolders? Is that where the files are? Anki can’t directly use media in subfolders, but did you have an add-on that used media from there?
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Yep they are reported as missing
It says that the 2 folders are from pokemon_images and pogress_bars, they are from 2 add ons but i never put anything in those folders
Okay, thanks for ruling those things out.
What’s going on with the media on your other device? What’s going on when you look at these notes/cards on AnkiWeb? I’m asking because I checked your account and there hasn’t been any media deleted recently.
[When we’re done finding your files, you should also gives some thought to deleting the 19K unused files in your collection – especially since you have over 5GB of media in your account.
Clarifying to emphasize what @Eltaurus suggested: Don’t try to delete any media yet. This is a task for after you have back what you need and it’s working correctly.]
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It’s a bit of a speculation, but if the OS and/or the filesystems are different, then some characters in the filenames might get encoded differently, which prevents Anki from recognizing the files on the disk and the files referenced on the cards as the same. That would mean that the missing files are still there (so it’s better not to delete unused files in Anki before restoring the references). Can you try and locate any single missing file manually? For that, you’ll need to check how it is written down in a card’s field: should be something like [sound:audio.mp3] for audiofiles, or <img src="image.jpg"> for images (press <>, which appears when the cursor is hovered over the top right corner of the field, to see the full code). Then look for the file in your collection.media folder.
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