I have my exams next week and spent hours building 1000 of flashcards. I have a chromebook that unfortunately did not have linux but I had the automatic back ups set for every 30 minutes. So, I have Ankidroid downlooaded on two devices (both chromebooks) and on my smaller chromebook my anki decks hadn’t synced. I was trying to make it update and so pressed sync on both so that the smaller device would have all my flashcards that were on the bigger device. When it wasn’t working, I stupidly uninstalled the app - thinking that when I installed it again it would automatically update. However, it deleted everything on my main big laptop as well. When i reinstalled it on both laptops, the only back up showing was from weeks ago and i lost almost 2500 flashcards. None of my old backups are showing from yesterday. I’ve checked my drive on the big laptop and nothing is there so I think it was locally synced? I just wondered how likely is it that my flashcards are gone forever. If possible - please help restore my flashcards to the 25-04-2026 or even 26-04-2026 in the am. Any help would really be appreciated! - Panicking student
If I understand you correctly, you had AnkiDroid (right? not desktop Anki?) installed on 2 devices, and you had a separate collection on each device (2 collections, not synced). If that’s not correct, please clarify for me.
If you were trying to set up syncing to merge those collections that wouldn’t work – one would overwrite the other. But I can’t tell if that’s what was going wrong with your syncing or if it was something else. And it’s not clear to me whether one of your devices was in-sync with AnkiWeb, or how long it had been since you synced, or even if both devices were syncing with the same AnkiWeb account. More specific details about this might help me help you.
When you uninstalled AnkiDroid from those devices – yes, that deleted all of the data on those devices, both your current collections and the automatic backups AnkiDroid makes. So, after reinstalling, what you got back must have come through syncing with AnkiWeb – and it would only be current with the last time you successfully synced a device to AnkiWeb. The AnkiWeb servers don’t have anything more up-to-date than that.
Yes sorry, I was not super clear! So yes ankidroid on both devices - logged into the same account across all three - ankidroid and ankiweb. However, I had added flashcards on one device. So i wasn’t merging - just trying to update the other laptop - which had only one set of flashcards and I had completed three new sets on my other device. I uninstalled Ankidroid on only one device but this deleted my data on the other device
That wouldn’t happen because of AnkiDroid though. All the apps are offline-first, so uninstalling on one device wouldn’t affect another device. However if you have some Android systems that are keeping your installed/uninstalled apps, or their system storage, synced across all devices for your account – I could see something like that happening. Unfortunately, there’s nothing we can do about that.
If you successfully synced those added cards to AnkiWeb, then they should still be there on the server with the rest of your collection. What do you see when you log in to AnkiWeb through the website interface? https://ankiweb.net/decks
Ankiweb still has the older deck - when i pressed sync on the main laptop which contained all my new flashcards - I pressed the option to replace the deck on Ankiweb but it hasn’t updated for some reason.
If it didn’t complete syncing before you deleted the app and collection – or if you did a one-way sync from the other device in the wrong directly and overwrote it – that could be why.
Thank you!