Please, help me to recover lost media files ! šŸ˜±

Anki Syncing & AnkiWeb
1

Hello,

Such a bad dream ! :scream:

Today at around 3 pm, I have clicked on ā€œchecked the mediaā€ using Anki. And I donā€™t know why, but thousands of signing language videos I edited and added myself on a private deckā€¦ have disappeared now!

And of course, because after having removed those media it automatically synced (set by default when I close Anki app) with AnkiWeb, and in a second time automatically autosyncing on AnkiDroid, I lost those files everywhere, as I check it :

  • onto the Ankidroid collection.media folder;
  • onto the Ubuntu collection.media folder.
  • any of the removed files appear into my binā€¦

Then, being desperate, I was looking for a salvatā€¦solution on the web, seeing on this page:

ā€œIf you are unable to recover your media from any of your devices, we may be able to restore it from AnkiWebā€™s backups for you if it was deleted recently.ā€

Can you help me to recover all lost files?

I had something like ā‰ˆ 117.000 media files (and now only ā‰ˆ104.000).

Thanks a million for your help!

2

Have you checked your ā€œregularā€ backups? AnkiWeb backups can only be retrieved by gently asking @dae to see if there are any.

3

Thank you BlackBeans for your answer.

Yes, I have checked in my backup folders in Anki (Ubuntu) and AnkiDroid. Any of them reload lost media files.

There is only the ā€œmedia.trashā€ PC folder that let me recover only 10% of lost files (I donā€™t know why more).

But such kind of ā€œmedia.trashā€ folder or equivalent doesnā€™t seem to exist anywhere in internal or external /Android/data/ folders for AnkiDroid.

Ok, thanks for your tip, Iā€™ll contact Damien Elmes the most gently possible :slight_smile:

Have a good day!

Yoannajp

4

I can only see 5 deleted files in your AnkiWeb account over the last month. So either the files were deleted before you synced them to AnkiWeb (ie, you never uploaded them), or you have already restored all the files and synced them back to AnkiWeb.

1 Like
5

Hello Damien,

Thanks for your feedback.
OK, well it means the files I lost are many videos in .mp4 files that havenā€™t synced to Ankiweb since months and months and I donā€™t know why.
I use those files in my cards with (in html) for example :

<video muted="" autoplay="" loop="" width="400" height="300" controls=""><source src="471093Monacostsksf.mp4"></video>
6

Media syncing doesnā€™t look at the content of your cards. As long as those files were not 0 bytes large, they should have been synced if media syncing completed successfully.

7

Hello,

I think I understood the very issue:

When I create/edit cards on Ankidroid: mp4 videos added to cards and imported into collection.media folder (as a jpg picture, or a mp3 sound for example) never sync in the Anki PC collection.media folder.

And vice versa when I edit card adding video files with Anki PC.

So sadā€¦

Is there a bypass?

Thanks!

8

Unless the files are over 100MB (which is not supported), it sounds like an AnkiDroid bug.

For editing, see Syncing with AnkiWeb - Anki Manual