Hi, where can I see how much cloud storage my decks actually use?
I see some numbers at the bottom of AnkiWeb that say " Disk usage: 2068.92MB (974.40MB media)" but in my case they are (much) higher than the 250Mb limit from the FAQ, so that can’t be the right number?
I don’t seem to have any problems with syncing but I just want to make sure I stay under the limit, as I have downloaded a few shared language decks which are quite large.
(As an aside, I’d be very happy to pay for storage if that was possible and if the limit becomes a problem)
I’d recommend bringing the size down, as you won’t be able to do a one-way upload to AnkiWeb at that size, and it may stop working entirely in the future. Your collection has a lot of notes, and those notes have a lot of embedded formatting in them which takes up space. Anki was designed with the assumption that the text on notes would be relatively short, and such large collections are hard on the servers - so even if paid accounts are introduced in the future, there is still likely to remain a limit on the size of collections while the current data format remains.
You can shrink things down by importing the deck into a separate offline profile, deleting it from your main profile, and then periodically exporting+importing a smaller group of cards that you intend to study.
@neribr it appears to be your shared decks - please consider either slimming things down (the embedded HTML is likely the main culprit), or putting a warning on the download pages so people are aware of this issue.
Thank you, I will see what I can do to cut down the size. The advice with a second profile is certainly helpful.
These are mainly imported shared language-learning decks. Neri’s language decks are really good (the best ones I could find for each language) but indeed quite large.
Thinking about it further, I really only need to sync a few smaller decks. Or possibly not even that.
As most of my language learning happens on the tablet and not on my desktop computer, I really only have to keep the big language packs in Ankidroid and not sync them at all with the desktop app.
The desktop is more useful for writing my own notes, which I can then just export occasionally and import on Ankidroid if I want. So basically I can keep my Desktop and Tablet separate, so there’s no need for syncing at all.
I have some decks that contain whole Wiktionary articles on them, and these Wiktionary articles indeed end up occupying a lot of space.
Good news is that I can greatly reduce the deck sizes by doing an automated “cleaning” of the html code. I can probably reduce the deck sizes in 70%. I will do it when I get the chance. I can also split those decks in three parts to further reduze the size.
For the record, I’m sure that the two decks that have this problem of occupying too much space, are these Spanish and French decks:
If you are a regular user of Anki, the September update of this deck will cause issues for you. For the main course “F to E” and “E to F” cards, the “Wiktionary” field will quickly clog up your collection size and will put you above the allowed 250MB. This is possibly not an issue if this is the only deck you are using, for me however, it was a big problem until I figured it out.
Removing the “Wiktionary” field from the note type fixes the issue and frees up about 200MB of collection size.
As it happens, I’m using exactly these Spanish and French decks and your Chinese course (yes, I really learn all three languages). And thank you for producing these excellent decks!
I personally don’t find it necessary to have the full Wiktionary text in them, although it may sometimes be useful for looking up details. Perhaps you can produce a version without the wiktionary, or with just a link?
Or just add a note to the description that users may want to delete that field to save space (with a short explanation how). It’s easy to fix for the user, but not obvious.
So I went for the simple option of keeping the Desktop app (for writing own notes) and Ankidroid (for learning shared decks, in particular languages) separate so that there is no need for syncing at all now and my server space usage went down by a factor of 1000 from 2Gb to 2Mb.
Again thanks to @dae for the good work creating and maintaining Anki and to @neribr for creating excellent language decks.
I use mainly self made decks, but when I’ve downloaded some premade language decks with mp3 files, I’ve deleted the media and used native TTS support instead.
It works great for me and can help to reduce the decks’ size drastically.
Is there any estimate on when large collections might stop working?
Many of the well-known med school decks are at least a couple GB in size, presumably due to use of media (which is largely necessary or helpful) and formatting.
Keeping them segregated into online/offline profiles could be possible, though doing that efficiently is beyond my knowledge, especially when a given day’s reviews come from a diverse set of decks/subdecks.
So, after more fiddling around I found a better solution for syncing only some decks. In the desktop app, this is easily done by creating a second profile that is not synchronised. In the Android app this is more complicated as it doesn’t support profiles yet, but one can install a parallel version (Release AnkiDroid 2.15.6 · ankidroid/Anki-Android · GitHub) that uses a different directory and is not synced with the server.
So I can keep the large language decks only on the Android tablet but can still synchronise the other decks between devices. If I occasionally want to work on a non-synchronised deck on a different computer, I can export, transfer and import it by hand.