Is there a way to update an imported deck, so I don't lose my progress with the cards already in there?

Hi all,

I’m currently studying french and building my own vocab list.
I imported a deck when it was around 600 cards, and now it’s up to around 1300.

I don’t want to lose the progress I’ve already made and have to reset the deck when I update the new one - is there a way to keep the progress?

I had a quick look on here and couldn’t find the answer, so apologies if this question has been asked before.

Thank you!

If you toggle off Import any learning progress during import, your progress on existing cards will be preserved even if the imported deck has the author’s scheduling information. You can verify this by looking at a card’s Info in the browser.

It is a good idea to make a backup beforehand (FileCreate Backup) so that you will be able to easily revert the import if anything goes wrong.

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As long as the deck author has done what they need to make sure the deck is updatable (generally, note type hasn’t changed and 1st field hasn’t changed), the updates will be made to your notes, and it won’t impact your progress on your cards at all – Packaged Decks - Anki Manual .

There are import options for you to choose whether notes are updated. But keep in mind – if you are someone who edits and adds things to notes as you go, the most recently changed note will be the one you end up with – and that can include overwriting the edits you’ve made to notes.

In that case, to protect your own changes to the 600 original notes, your best bet would be to import the updated deck into a new (temporary) profile, narrow it down to just the 700 notes that are new (hopefully there’s tags or subdecks that will make that easier), and export just those as an apkg so you can import that into your main profile instead.

Perhaps you’re unaware/forgot about the “update notes if newer” option in the importing screen? That should be easier than juggling multiple profiles, if I haven’t missed something.

I considered that, but I was concerned that there’s no way for a user to know whether their changes to the notes or the author’s imported changes are “newer.” There’s not much documentation on the import options, so am I understanding that option incorrectly?

If “newer” is measured by when they are being imported, the author’s changes would always control. So it must be measured by the note modification date (right?), which seems like it would be a complete unknown. Once you’ve started customizing (or correcting, as is usually the issue I face) notes in a shared deck, trying to import an updated version of the deck becomes a bit of a minefield.

Sorry, my wording was confusing. I was referring to the “update notes” setting, and it was the “never” setting that I was thinking of, which will prevent updates even if the notes are newer.

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Oh, yep, that would work great too!

Hi thanks all for the responses - I had been using Anki solely on iphone from a csv file so I garner I’ll need to change this to an Anki file to get it to work.

I’ll download it onto my computer and have a play.

Thank you!

The csv import screen in AnkiMobile also gives you the option to preserve existing notes.

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