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.
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.
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.
Thank yall so much for all yall’s help! Good news is - I ended up being able to extract the data. For anyone else this might happen to in the future - it required physically opening up the phone, separating screen from the internal components, and removing the face ID sensor to get it out of the recovery mode/reboot loop. I was then able to synch the Anki mobile data with the Anki web data.
I did also learn from the Apple folks that the Anki mobile app itself DOES NOT store updated data with regular iCloud backups. So for those thinking a backup saves the mobile data, it does not. It may have been possible to access with the “On My Phone” files like Dankia_Dakika mentioned, but I was unable to access them (at least through my online iCloud), when my phone was in recovery mode. Hope this helps anyone that might have a similar issue in the future! Learn from my mistake and daily sync your phone and web data
AnkiMobile stores collections & media in an area that as far as I understand it, does get backed up, so if the user has sufficient iCloud storage and a full backup of their device, recovery may be possible by reverting the device to the full backup. This is not something I’ve personally tested however.
For anyone that encounters this problem in the future, I can confirm that Apple was incorrect about the AnkiMobile data and iCloud backup. Once I got a new phone and set it up with my iCloud backup, the AnkiMobile data on the new phone aligned with the Ankimobile data on the old phone from the point in time of the most recent backup. I was not forced to use the AnkiWeb sync I had created. Hope this helps clarify for anyone else who might have a similar struggle. Thanks again to all!
