Restore Accidentally Deleted Media

Anki Help
1

Hello,
I accidentally deleted/corrupted ⁨11795⁩+ media files while copying, I tried to restore from a previous backup without success. Please, is someone here able to recover them?

2

Media is not included in the automatic backups that Anki makes locally.

First things first – avoid spreading the issue. If Anki is running, turn off automatic syncing. If Anki is not running, hold down Shift when you start (until you see the confirmation message) and then turn off automatic syncing.

  • Where you copying them from & to? The original file location should have an uncorrupted copy.
  • Do you sync with any other devices? As long as you haven’t synced, those would still have your full collection.media folder that you could copy.
3

I only use Anki on PC, collection.media was deleted and my copy was corrupted.

4

I’m so sorry! That is a rough situation if you don’t have any backups or archives. [A good reminder – and I’m going to go refresh my backup copy of my media right now.]

  • Did any of this media come from shared decks? If so, you can download that apkg again, import it into a new (temporary) profile, and then copy the collection.media from that profile folder to your main one. [This avoids having to worry about updating any of your data if you did a straight import.]
  • I imagine that not all 11K+ files were corrupted, so perhaps you can identify the corrupted ones and delete them. Then you can use Check Media to quickly identify what media is missing, tag those notes (“Tag Missing”), and start working on replacing the media.
5

Thanks, but no chance of replacing the media manually, luckily all cards had phonetic transcription and I’ll move on for a few months.

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6

I have restored the media recently deleted fromy our AnkiWeb account. It should automatically download the next time you sync.

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7

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