I have been using a deck I purchased (let’s call it Deck A.1) for a few months now and have made some edits to cards (things like adding acronyms and additional info)
The creator of Deck A.1 just released an updated version of this deck, let’s call it A.2, with about 25 lengthy new cards added. This was sent out in the .colpkg format.
I’m essentially hoping to keep A.1 intact and continue working off of that, so I avoid losing my notes and progress, but I’d like to integrate these new cards from A.2. So:
I’m open to manually adding these, but the problem is that I can’t even open the new file in Anki without seemingly having deck A.1 wiped.
I added the add-on for downloading multiple decks, but that doesn’t seem to be working for me (nothing happens after I select the folder with both .colpkgs of both A.2 and the recently exported A.1, which I assume would save my progress as well)
Has anyone gone through a similar issue before? I haven’t found anything in the forums that is a clear parallel to my situation. Any help would be much appreciated!
This is a mistake by whoever sent it to you. .colpkg always replaces the entire collection, you should ask to get a .apkg instead. See Exporting - Anki Manual.
You should tell the deck author not to do that. You do not want to import a COLPKG of someone else’s collection – it will completely overwrite your collection, including not just your edits, but all of your review history. Exporting - Anki Manual
If the deck author provides you with the proper APKG file, when you import it, you can choose to reject updates to your existing notes. Packaged Decks - Anki Manual
If the deck author won’t listen to reason, you can do this on your own by creating a fresh (temporary) Profile – Profiles - Anki Manual . Import that COLPKG file there, so it can’t harm your collection, and export just those 25 new notes as an APKG, without scheduling information. You can safely import that into your own collection (and then delete the temporary profile).