I had desired retention set to 90% and had about 150 reviews per day in a deck with 17000 cards. I raised it to 95%, hit optimize, and the review count went up over 4000!
So I put retention back to 90%, but the review count did not go down. How do I get back to where I was, with a manageable number of daily reviews?
(My mistake was to enable reschedule cards on change!)
Ctrl + Z or Edit > Undo changes
If you have closed Anki you could revert to a backup Backups - Anki Manual
Thank you. I have reverted to a backup from before I turned on FSRS. But I would still like to use FSRS as it appears to be the best algorithm.
Just to clarify, I turned on FSRS on January 2. There were no problems until two days ago, when I decided to increase my desired retention from 90 to 95 and enabled “Reschedule Cards on Change.” That’s when my daily reviews shot up from around 150 to over 4000.
Could someone advise me how to turn on FSRS with a target retention of 90% and not get inundated with reviewing very old cards? There are hundreds or thousands of these old cards in my deck, many of which I have forgotten. Before I turned on FSRS I would see a few of these a day and was achieving a retention on mature cards in the high 80% range. After turning on FSRS (with reschedule enabled) I was flooded with many of these old cards, and my retention dropped to the mid-70s. Very frustrating.
Thanks.
That was extreme, and you would have lost a lot of data doing that. The most recent backup before you changed the Desired Retention was the one that you wanted. It’s still there if you want to restore that instead. File > Revert to Backup.
You can just turn FSRS on, optimize your parameters, leave your DR at 90%, and do not tick reschedule-on-change. Your cards will stay scheduled as they currently are, and FSRS rescheduling will apply to them the next time you study them.
Thank you Danika. I have followed your advice on both counts. What a relief!