Phone in Recovery Mode - Way to Recover Deck Data Before Reset?

AnkiMobile (iPhone/iPad) Help
1

I use Anki exclusively on my phone and my phone recently experienced water damage which might necessitate a factory reset. The phone is stuck on “recovery mode” and despite attempts to update the phone rather than reset it, the phone will not update.

I have unfortunately not synced my Anki phone data to my Anki Web data in quite some time ~ probably 6 months. I do however, have an iPhone backup from ~5 days ago on 7/11/25.

I was wondering if anyone knew of any way to recover the most recent study deck data from Anki mobile prior to going through with the phone reset? Or will I have to go through with the reset and go back to where I was 5 months ago? Or with resetting, will I go back to the iPhone backup from 5 days ago on 7/11/25?

If anyone has endured this before, any clarity you could provide before I reset my phone and erase the Anki app would be greatly appreciated. Or if there’s somehow a file somewhere (my phone was actively connected to internet before it went down) that could be restored, that would be great.

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You are lucky, you have a five day old backup. If there is no way to backup the current state of your phone by connecting it to a computer, I am afraid only forensic tools might help to exfiltrate data from the broken system. But again: You are lucky as you can restore from a recent backup.

3

I agree with ferophila – there’s generally no way to access your data on an iOS device except for through the app.

You may be able to seek support from Apple to create (or extract?) a fresh device backup that will let you restore from more recently than 5d ago. If I were you, I would also want to be sure that my AnkiMobile data is actually preserved in that device backup before resetting, but you’ll have to check with Apple to find out what they include in their backups.

Your Anki data is stored in parts of your phone that you can’t access – with one exception: your Anki automatic backup files are stored in your “On My Phone” files. If you’ve got access to that (through iCloud or iTunes?), the most recent COLPKG file there is what you’ll want – Preferences - AnkiMobile Manual . However that doesn’t include any of your media. So getting your hands on that COLPKG before you reset might be just part of the process.

  • If you can use your device backup to get your collection back from 5d ago, and that has your entire profile, including collection.media, you can import the COLPKG on top of that to update your collection. You’d be missing (at most) 5d of recently added media and 30m of edits/updates/reviews that happened after the last backup.

  • If that device backup doesn’t have your collection, all is not lost. You could sync with your old collection on AnkiWeb until you have all of your media, and then import the COLPKG. You’d be missing any media you created/added in the past months, but at least your review history would be more current than that.

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