I accidentally overwrote my AnkiWeb collection during a sync today, August 13, 2026.
My original collection had all of my decks and cards, but after reinstalling Anki on my Mac and syncing, my AnkiWeb account now only shows the Default deck with 0 cards.
I have checked my Mac thoroughly. My current collection.anki2 was created today at 5:10 PM and is only 139 KB, so it is the new empty collection. The only local backup available is also from today at 5:15 PM, after the data was already lost.
I do not have Anki installed on any other device.
However, my AnkiWeb account still shows approximately 7.36 MB of unused media, which appears to be from my previous collection.
Could you please check whether there is a recent server-side backup of my AnkiWeb collection from before today’s overwrite and, if one exists, restore it to my account?
I understand that restoring a server-side backup may overwrite the current collection, and I am okay with that because I am trying to recover my original decks.
I’m looking at the account connected to the email address you used to post here. It was created just a few weeks ago on 29 July. There are backups made during the past few weeks, but each of them is empty. I don’t think this is the account you could be talking about, unless you created the cards during the past week, on the AnkiWeb site.
Are you sure you don’t have another AnkiWeb account?
What makes you think you overwrote your collection?
If you were setting up syncing for the first time on your Mac –
Were you forced to choose between upload to AnkiWeb and download from AnkiWeb – and you incorrectly chose upload?
Were you not given a choice? If so, it’s because sync recognized that your local collection was empty – so it simply proceeded with downloading.
I only have ever signed up with one email id for my anki account, and it is the same email id i was using when i originally created my decks and synced them up. Let me explain the whole thing if it makes it better
i created my entire deck on 5th august and it took me 6 hours to make it.
at some point afterwards, i used macOS erase all contents and settings option, which completely erased my mac. Before the reset, i was using this same account/email id.
after setting up the mac again and reinstalling anki, i found that my local anki collection was empty and only contained the default deck, my original decks and cards were no longer there.
i then synced anki ans was given the option to upload to ankiweb or to download from ankiweb, i chose uploard to ankiweb, because i believed my original collection was still on my mac, i realised now that this may have uploaded the empty collection and overwritten whatever was previously stored on ankiweb
i also noticed that my ankiweb account still has 7.36 mb of unused media. On my mac, the collection.media folder contains around 7.7 mb/ 800 media files, i am not sure whether this is useful for recovery, but i wanted to mention it because these appear to be media associated with my previous collection.
so i thought that the original collection may have been lost when i erased the mac, and then empty collection may have been uploaded to ankiweb.
is there any possibility that there is a server side backup or snapshot from around august 5 or before the upload that could contain my original decks. I would really really appreciate if there was any way to recover it!!!
This sounds like it is definitely what happened. And it isn’t clear that AnkiWeb ever had it.
.1. It sounds like that happened on your Mac. But, when did you sync the collection to AnkiWeb?
There were server-side backups made a week ago at [click for local timestamp] and “today” at [click for local timestamp] – and both are empty. Part of this depends on when those times lines up with your time zone, but it suggests that you hadn’t yet synced it to AnkiWeb by the time the 1st one was made, and you either still hadn’t synced it, or had already deleted it, by the time the 2nd one was.
That’s possible, because once you’re logged in to an AnkiWeb account, media is synced in the background periodically. But if you didn’t sync your collection database – by clicking Sync, or by auto-syncing when you opened/closed the app – AnkiWeb never had that data.