I’ve made some decks that were tied to a specific environment but I no longer need to study those decks daily. The issue is that I still want to keep them along with their review history, since I had invested time and effort into building and studying them.
Currently, there are the two options I’m considering:
Setting new/review limits to 0, I tried this but it only hides the deck from daily study. It still creates overdue backlog in the statistics, and that’s kinda annoying.
Suspending all cards, I haven’t given it a try mainly because I wasn’t sure how much it would impact the deck. I’m guessing it would work better but it’s manual and feels like too much work. I also suspect that unsuspending the cards will create a huge backlog when resuming.
An archive feature could:
Automatically suspend all cards in the deck
Exclude the deck from due counts and backlog calculations
Preserve all scheduling data, review history, and statistics
Hide archived decks from the main deck list, or at least moves it to the bottom
Allow one-click unarchive to resume studying when needed
I feel like this will also benefit my small decks that I only need to review once a week.
Thank you for considering it!
It must do that though. The cards become overdue because your memory of those infos fades away over time. Sure, the natural process of forgetting can be annoying. But ankis goal is to help you to study; so if a card becomes overdue, then there is a good reason for it. Changing it would go against the goal of anki and against memory sciences.
That’s the way to go.
It’s not. Go to the card browser, select your deck in the side panel, Ctrl+A to select all cards, then right click and suspend. Takes less than 10 seconds.
Yes, of course it would. See above.
Suspended cards aren’t counted in due anyways. Pretending they wouldn’t be in a backlog is a bad idea as that makes your learning worse.
If you just suspend the cards (which your proposal is basically saying), then that one is already the way it happens.
Aside from the above: it should also be considered that every feature brings maintainance burden. Is suspending entire decks really a common operation? And is the current implementation (the one that takes 10 seconds max) really not good enough?
Hello, and thank you for taking the time to respond.
I apologize for my formatting without quotes, as this is my first time on the forum.
I understand that forgetting is a natural process, and I’m not complaining about it or suggesting that overdue cards are wrong. My concern isn’t with the learning model itself but with improving how intentional inactivity is represented.
In my case, some decks were needed for a specific context that has ended. When I set limits to 0, the overdue backlog is logically correct, but it no longer reflects my intent, which is that this material is explicitly inactive rather than neglected.
Thank you for explaining the suspension steps. I tried it as you suggested and it did mostly solve the problem, so I appreciate that. I’m not saying suspension is difficult to use. It works well, but it doesn’t clearly reflect the idea that a whole deck is intentionally paused and hides it from the active decks list.
From my own experience, decks I would want to “archive” fall into two cases: either decks that have already been mastered, or ones that I explored briefly but intentionally postponed. In both cases, the goal is not to avoid learning but to mark the deck as inactive without affecting daily workload or statistics.
I understand that every new feature has a maintenance charge, and I’m not assuming this should be implemented or prioritized. I’m simply sharing this because a native archive would make my personal system clearer and easier to manage. Whether it’s common or worth implementing is of course up to the developers.