I have a huge issue and I hope someone can help me. I have one account and I had 4 profiles more or less. Each profile was used for a different language and had different decks. I could easily switch the profile on the AnkiApp. The problem is that I had to reset my computer due to issues and now I can only find one profile on the app, because there’s only one of my 4 profiles on the web version. I know the other profiles are somewhere, I just don’t know how to access them and it’s making me desperate.
Unfortunately, an AnkiWeb account can only sync one profile – Profiles - Anki Manual . So unless you created separate AnkiWeb accounts for your other profiles, you were either –
Not syncing those other 3 profiles – which means there are no copies of those collections on AnkiWeb’s servers.
Syncing all 4 profiles to a single account and continually overwriting one with another – which would have been noticeable from frequently being required to do one-way syncs.
In the future, keep in mind that a single user hardly ever needs multiple profiles, so there’s no reason to create many and open yourself up to this sort of risk of data loss.
Just to be clear – I can see your AnkiWeb account, so I know you’ve been using an authentic version of Anki for at least some of your studies. But was all of that profile switching happening in a copycat app – Anki knockoffs - Anki FAQs ?
I could switch the profiles on the AnkiApp that I downloaded from the site, I don’t actually know what you mean. Anyway, that means that even if you have the profiles on the App, you’re going to lose them all anyway if they’re linked to the same account. It would have been great to know that before putting almost one year of work on there, wow. That’s so depressing.
You keep name-checking one of the knockoff apps – that’s why I was asking about that. If you were maintaining these multiple collections in that app and not Anki, I have no idea what might still be there.
The point is that they can’t be linked to the same account (or at least, they shouldn’t be).
In your other profiles, did you ever set up syncing? If you never clicked Sync and never saw auto-sync messages on open/close/profile-switch – that would be a good indicator that you weren’t actually syncing.
Or if you did set up syncing in those profiles, and were making sure each of your collections synced, then you were being told that you needed to overwrite your collection every time – that could have alerted you that there was a problem.
But, none of that is going to help with where you are now, so moving on to solutions –
Did you have your collections on any other devices?
Did you preserve any backups of your computer before you wiped it?
It is pretty clear in the entry on Profiles in the Anki manual that only one profile may be synchronised per AnkiWeb account. You may not have seen it, or you may have missed the other information available on the topic.
When you reset your computer, did you only reset/reinstall the operating system part, or did you wipe all the data from the disk. If the former, you may be able to find the Anki data still on disk. See here for locations to search.
Each profile may have many different languages and many decks. It makes it much easier, than changing profiles. I have over twenty decks in my profile, some of which contain subdecks.
I only use four profiles in Anki.
my main one, my personal decks (mentioned above).
a test deck, where I can make changes to Note Types, HTML, sounds, images, etc., in a safe place, where the main deck (often shared publicly) will not be affected.
decks for two of my friends. I maintain several decks, which are private, but shared privately with a couple of very non-technical friends. When significant updates are made to those decks, they have given me permission to switch profiles to their decks, import the changes, and then synchronise that deck (with their account). This means that they have trusted me with the log-on name and password for their AnkiWeb account.
I thought that might give you some ideas going forward. All of the above, though presumes that you are using AnkiWeb and approved and supported apps from Anki, not any of the knock-offs mentioned above.
I don’t have the collections on any other devices. I had the backups of all the profiles but I think they’ve all been deleted when they reset the computer. I had only saved backups from november but I lost the data from november to july because it all happened so fast.I didnt’ have time to save the profiles and export them.
As I understand it, you were not synchronising these other profiles. If they were not synchronised, then the data never left the machine, on which the profile was active.
There are periodic server-side backups made and kept for a short time. I checked the ones in the AnkiWeb account associated with the email you used to post here – they were all variations of the same collection, and it’s the same collection that was currently active in that account. You said you didn’t have any other AnkiWeb accounts, so that’s all we’ve ever had on our servers.