My decks have disappeared – how can I restore them?

Anki Syncing & AnkiWeb
1

Hello,

I received the email about my AnkiWeb account expiry. Unfortunately, I noticed that my decks/cards have already disappeared from my AnkiWeb account.

Could you please let me know if it is possible to restore my data, and what steps I should take to recover my decks (including images and sounds)?

Thank you in advance for your help.

2

I can see the AnkiWeb account associated with the email address you used to post here. The data was removed from it in October 2025, after your account had been inactive for at least 6 months. We delete the data from accounts in our system that aren’t being used for syncing or studying, so AnkiWeb isn’t suitable for long-term storage of your inactive collection – AnkiWeb account removal - Anki FAQs.

But this account is not currently empty – and we wouldn’t have sent an email to you recently about removing this account. You should check the email address on that email, because it’s possible it’s about some other account.

For whatever account is empty – if you still have a local copy of your collection on any device where you used Anki (or AnkiMobile or AnkiDroid), you can upload your collection to AnkiWeb and resume syncing. (Although I’ll encourage you to merge your collections/profiles into one account, to avoid this confusion in the future.

Other things you can do right now –

  • Make sure the email address you’re using for your AnkiWeb account is one that you have permanent access to. If you lose touch with that email, you won’t get important emails from us – like notification that your data is pending deletion. And if you can’t re-verify your email address annually, you might not be able to access AnkiWeb at all.
  • If you change addresses on the account, make sure your ISP/domain/spam filter allows emails from ankiweb.net, so we will be able to reach you in the future.
  • If you know you’re going to take a long break from studying, you can create your own COLPKG backup of your collection and store that in a separate place (e.g., another device, or cloud storage account). Backups - Anki Manual