Yesterday, I got sidetracked while studying, and I accidentally switched devices, from Anki on an iPad to AnkiDroid. I noticed almost immediately, and tried to sync everything up.
I did NOT have to do a one-way sync. Nonetheless, the end result was that I ended having 34 new cards introduced before Anki (ios) and AnkiDroid agreed that I was done. The deck settings are supposed to introduce 20 new cards per day.
I don’t think there were any other side effects. I just have a lot of extra reviews from adding 14 extra cards a day.
For next time, is there a clean way to recover from simultaneous unsynchronized studying?
That sounds like a sync conflict. Although an unusual one, because typically the problem would be the same cards introduced on both devices, not extra cards introduced.
Unless – do you use a random New card gather order? If so, that would make sense. But it also means you got away with the least possible issues from this.
- When you realize it’s happening, stop and get your devices in sync – which sounds like what you already did.
- You don’t have to keep going and introducing more New cards than you’re comfortable with. You can stop and reduce your “Today only” limit to 0. [You can also address that tomorrow, reduce your “Today only” limit to 6 to make up the difference.]
If you had more serious conflicts, there might be things you’d need to recover from, but not for this.
I do use random gather order. I’m constantly adding vocabulary in different areas, and I want to get breadth of knowledge rather than ending up focused on a bunch of cards I added at once on a particular esoteric subject.
Out of curiousity, how come Anki seemed to synchronize the review scheduling of the newly introduced cards, but didn’t count them toward the daily limit?
It sounds like that helped you avoid the larger annoyance of studying the same cards twice.
The scheduling for those cards wouldn’t have been there until you synced.