Please help, i've messed up my cards

Hi all. I’ve messed up my anki cards, I think by using the postpone function wrong. I know this sounds stupid, but I was trying to “negative postpone,” by writing “-1” for example, on my anki deck, to get less cards for today. I know there are other ways to do that but I was just trying it out.

But then it wasn’t working, so I put “-10000” or something. Still the amount of cards due wasn’t changing. Then I went to do my cards, and all of the reschedule buttons said “100 years” so I entered a bunch of numbers into the postpone feature to try to get it back. and now i’m lost and it just says 100 years.

Is there a way to reset my cards to as they were just before this happened ? I don’t want to reset the whole deck!!

Please let me know, thank you so much, I really appreciate it.

Try checking this: Backups - Anki Manual

Okay, the problem is actually that my intervals are all wacked and totally different from yesterday ever since I made some weird changes and used the postpone feature. They are all much bigger now than they actually should be

When I go to use my ANKI deck, hard is 1.8 months, good is 4.2 months, etc. But these are cards that I was studying yesterday, and the intervals were 1 day or 3 days or whatever.

But when I go into my intervals, all the settings are the correct/automated settings.

What could be happening?

Also, all my due dates as of now in the browse section look correct I think. It’s just the future intervals that are super off.

I guess you used this add-on: Postpone card's review - AnkiWeb?

If so, inputting a negative value kind of has the opposite effect than what you wanted to achieve. It allows you to see cards in advance, before their due date has come.

So if you input e.g. -365, you will see cards one year before their due date. Similarly, cards that were due today will count as overdue by 365 days, i.e. Anki will think that you should have studied them one year ago. Or, in your case, about 10000 days ago.

The intervals of overdue cards are usually longer than one could expect, see this page of the manual for the reason why: Due times after a break - Frequently Asked Questions

(See also this for info about the add-on: GitHub - Arthur-Milchior/Anki-postpone-reviews: Allow to postpone every reviews)

That said, I think you have two main options:

  • use the add-on one more time to counteract your previous mistake. E.g. if you first put -10000, you could now input 10000 (without the negative sign) to try and balance things out.
    This method is potentially a bit messy, I would not use it unless you remember exactly the numbers you input the first time and/or the other option does not work for you.
  • Restore an automatic backup made before you used the add-on. This will allow you to undo all the changes you made to your collection from the moment you used the postpone function onwards. All cards will have again their normal scheduling and intervals.
    I would always prefer this method, except maybe if you made some other important change to your collection in the meanwhile that you absolutely want to keep, and/or if you do not have a backup to restore.
    It is a good idea to create a manual backup first, just in case.
    See this for instructions: Backups - Anki Manual
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