Lost my backups and collection.media folder

Anki Syncing & AnkiWeb
1

Hi,

I have anki ios, a primary computer I use anki on, and a secondary computer I sometimes use anki on. I decided to copy the entire roaming anki2 folder from my primary yesterday so that I could replace the secondary computer’s anki2 folder so that all my addons would have the exact settings I like. I did this but then suddenly my media files were missing on the secondary computer and no longer could play audio. I then pressed sync and still nothing. Now my anki ios which has never had issues also suddenly lost all its audio files.

I have tried using backups but I just cannot get my media files back from a recent enough time (around 5 pm yesterday) where I made a lot of changes that I would like to not lose.

Can someone check my account and see if my ankiweb has a recent backup from october 8 at 4 pm or after mountain time? Thank you.

2

Your Anki2 folder contains all of your automatic backups, but those don’t include media. Your media is stored in the collection.media folder (for each profile). If you copied that from one computer to another, it should work just fine. And a typical “copy” operation wouldn’t delete any files that were already present at the new location.

  • Is it possible that you have multiple profiles on your install and you’re now using the wrong one?
  • After you copied the Anki2 folder (which hopefully you did while Anki was not running), did you run Tools > Check Database, and Tools > Check Media on secondary?

If you do really need to recover something, your collection.media should all be present and accounted for on your primary computer, so that should be your first stop. (If Anki isn’t already running on primary, start it in safe mode to skip automatic syncing.) On primary, run Tools > Check Media and make sure there aren’t any missing files. Then force a one-way sync to upload to AnkiWeb from there, and you can receive that one-way sync as a download on secondary and AnkiMobile.

[In the future, to copy your add-ons and their configs from one device to another, you only need to copy the addons21 folder from one Anki2 to the other.]