I recently lost approx 250 notes as I imported a new file (with field 1 being the same as many notes in my deck) but must have clicked “Update” instead of “Preserve” on matching cards. I now have 250 identical notes but their history shows they were created at various time over the last year, so I know they are updates of previous notes.
I have read that I can restore from an automatic backup file, however this means losing all images, which I use in virtually every note, so the trade off is not worth it.
Is there a way to restore the previous edit / original content of these 250 notes individually?
I am on a mac and use the latest update of Anki. This loss of cards happened 4 days ago but I only realised today, and have added more cards since.
Restoring from the backup shouldn’t remove any images. Here is a section of a manual about backups: Backups - Anki Manual
If you need to restore a state from 4 days ago there is a high chance, that you still have a backup file for that.
To not lose cards created after that fatal incident you can export them first, load backup and then import them again.
I was referring to an automatic back up - this is the info I had read … am I misunderstanding something in thinking that I will lose images attached to the notes?
“Anki will create automatic backups of your card data. These include the text on your cards and your scheduling information, but do not include sounds or image files.”
This means, that if you deleted your image files, then restoring a backup will not restore them.
However, if images are still on your computer and you restore the backup they will not be removed.
Thank you. Apologies, I’m not particularly techie. When you say “if images are still on your computer” are you referring to the original media files (which I delete as its 1000s of screenshots), or the files in the collection.media folder in my Anki folder?
I have managed to restore the over-written cards, and also the new cards I added since making that mistake. No data lost! Thank you very much for your help.