Keeping two identical decks for different purposes - help!

Hi everyone. I am a med student. As many med students know, there are decks that contain pre-made cards that we all use. I have my own anki deck where I make my own cards based on our med school lectures. Then, if I know there’s third-party resource cards I wanna use, I go into the pre-made decks, find the relevant cards I wanna study, then MOVE the pre-made cards to my OWN deck, so it mixes with my handmade cards. This way all the cards I am studying are in one deck/spot, shuffled together. I have tried keeping cards separate and home in their premade deck, and just unsuspending them as needed, but I like it better the way I do it. Let’s call the pre-made deck I am tapping into and moving cards to my own deck, “Deck #1”. This will just help for later.

Well, here’s my problem. I want to be able to keep a set of the pre-made deck with all of its original cards (not missing the ones I’ve moved to my own deck) to study as I am studying for my USMLE/STEP1 board exam. Let’s call this deck “Deck #2”. I want to go in to the complete pre-made deck (Deck #2) and un-suspend sub-decks as needed. The problem is that when I try to import another copy of the pre-made deck, it obviously sees duplicates and removes them, and so the imported deck (Deck #2) is basically empty. I do not know how to fix this. I tried making multiple profiles, which worked for a bit, but I quickly realized that messed up synching and so I could never sync.

I want to keep Deck #1 AND Deck #2. Deck #1 for moving cards as needed to use while I’m still learning content for the first time, and Deck #2 to study for my board exam. Please help me!

An AnkiWeb account can only sync with a single profile, so you could make multiple profiles work with multiple AnkiWeb account. But there are plenty of reasons not to do it that way.

The main reason is that you’ve already started studying those cards. When it comes time to shift to Deck #2, you’ll want to keep studying the same card with its accumulated review history – not to switch to an “identical” New card and start over from scratch.

The easiest solution is to stop thinking of the decks as sacred. You can move these cards into your own deck for now, and when it comes time to switch gears to study for your boards, move them back. You’ve either already got an excellent tagging system in the premade deck, and you can base your boards study on those tags instead – or you can add tags before you move the cards the first time, to help you find their way back.

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