Today (April 20th) I took my computer in for repairs, and they ended up reinstalling Windows for me. But now I’ve run into a big problem… I had to reinstall Anki, and sadly, I lost one of my previous backups. You see, I had created two separate decks — one for studying English, and the other for Chinese. But after everything got fixed, only the English deck synced from AnkiWeb. The Chinese one is just… gone. I’m really desperate here. Is there any way you could help me get it back? I’d honestly be so, so grateful.
Just to confirm, all the data that was there previously was wiped and you have no copy of your Anki folder, right? The folder having the automatic backups of your Anki profiles can be found here.
If you did not synchronise your decks with AnkiWeb and you do not have a backup of your collection, I’m afraid there’s little that can be done.
Side note: Are you referring to different profiles or different decks? If they are different decks in the same profile, then synchronising with AnkiWeb will synchronise all the decks of in that profile. If they are different profiles which synced with the same AnkiWeb account, you might be able to get a backed-up verison of the Chinese with the help of Danika.
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it’s actually that I had two different profiles
How can I contact Danika?
You can only restore the profile from anki web if it had been synced in the past. If you only synced profile A but not profile B, then profile B cannot be recovered.
Danika_Dakika will probably see this thread. Else, you could ping her. Though the above statement is still valid and Danika cannot do anything if the profile had never been synced.
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What everyone has said so far is correct. A single user almost never needs multiple profiles, and it’s more likely to lead to data loss (like this …) than anything else. Profiles - Anki Manual
Were you syncing your 2 separate profiles to 2 separate AnkiWeb accounts?
Or were you syncing both profiles to the same AnkiWeb account – and continuously overwriting one with the other?
Or did you never sync the profile with your Chinese deck?
Is that screenshot of your current install? Are those the profiles you were using before, or did you just create those again after re-installing?
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Oh and just to clarify — I did sync the Chinese profile before the reinstall
and it’s the same ankiweb account. The screenshot I sent was just to help illustrate the situation more clearly, not an exact reflection of the profiles I had. Sorry if that was confusing!
Thanks so much for your help!!!
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If you were syncing 2 profiles to the same AnkiWeb account, each time you switched you would have been overwriting one collection/profile with the other. Weren’t you getting “one-way sync” messages each time you switched and tried to sync?
When you connected your new install to AnkiWeb and downloaded your collection, what you got is the last profile you synced there. So if you synced the Chinese profile before the reinstall, that would be the one you downloaded. Since you downloaded the English profile, that says you’re mistaken about something – either how many accounts you have, or when you last synced.
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So there’s really no other way? That’s kinda sad… but at least I realized before it was too late.
If you’re convinced that you have only one AnkiWeb account, and that you’ve been overwriting it with each sync – then we can’t recover what we don’t have.
I have access to the AnkiWeb account for the address you used to post here, and I can see that you’ve been syncing it for the past couple days – but it doesn’t look like you’ve been syncing much before that, which is why I keep asking about other AnkiWeb accounts.
The entire log of sync history doesn’t show for me, but accounts that are actively syncing have periodic server-side backups created, and I can access those. The last backup this account has is from October 2024, just after the account was created. That makes me think this is not the AnkiWeb account you’ve been syncing with all along. But if there’s another account, you’re going to have to figure out what it is. Have you checked your various email addresses for confirmation/notification emails from ankiweb.net?
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Actually, it was one AnkiWeb account for two different profiles. Now I’ve decided to start over and keep everything in just one profile. I’ll treat this as a lesson learned.
Thank you so much for helping me so kindly and patiently. I really appreciate it!
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