Public service announcement: Please backup your Anki data.
The syncing service provided by AnkiWeb is great. But syncing is not backup. Why? Because if something bad happens to one copy, that badness can be synchronized to all of the other copies.
Please reference the “Backups” chapter of the Anki Manual for more information.
There are default automatic backups in all devices. So you can go back days or even months to last proper version in case of such “badness” event.
Any reason to make additional backups?
There are? I always enjoyed the adjustable application specific backups in some of my apps. Keeping an external backup of your device seems to be more an issue among Anki users.
Backups are a good thing. But they aren’t usually a solution to AnkiWeb-is-down-right-now issues. Anki is offline-first, so every user already has their own collection on their own device.
Devices can be lost, stolen, drowned, dropped, or otherwise stop working. And media isn’t included in any automatic backups.
I think that a best practice is to make manual backups regularly using the Export function. I usually export a .colpkg file with the “Include Media” option enabled, and I save these files to cloud storage.
(If you don’t have access to cloud storage, emailing the .colpkg file to yourself as an attachment could be a workaround to have a backup copy of your Anki collection stored off-site.)
I wish there were a way to export/backup directly from the ankiweb.net website. This would help users who don’t have an Anki app installed on a device but still want to back up their decks (perhaps when they get an AnkiWeb account expiration email.) It would also make backing up more convenient for other users. And, it might help users who are unsure when asked to perform a one-way sync. (The advice would be something like, “If you are unsure of which direction to sync, please first make two backup copies: one using Anki on your device and another from the ankiweb.net site.”)