I’m not too familiar with how to properly use Anki so I would like some help in retrieving my Anki decks. My laptop crashed and I called Apple support to get help in fixing it. It turns out that the OS was erased from my laptop so they recommended I erase everything from my laptop and reinstall an updated OS system. It had been since Jan/Feb since I did a proper backup of my laptop via Time machine onto my external hard drive. When I plugged in my external hard drive to my friends Mac computer (to see which files had been saved) and looked for my Anki decks none of my Anki decks were showing up in my files. I redownloaded the Anki app onto my friends computer and opened it up but still none of my anki decks appeared. I tried going to my laptops files (Library → application support → anki2 → profilename → backups) to try to see if any of my Anki decks were backed up before my laptop crashed but I am not seeing any backups.
I thought I had an Anki web account that was getting synched with my Anki desktop deck but when I logged into my Anki web account none of my Anki decks showed up. I did some more digging and I actually think that I never properly synched my Anki desktop to my Ankiweb account so I don’t think my decks were ever uploaded to Anki web
Is there any other way I could retrieve my Anki decks from my Anki desktop? I thought that by doing backups of my laptop onto an external hard drive, if my laptop were to crash, I could just use my external hard drive to transfer all my data onto a new laptop, including my Anki decks that were on my desktop. Am I missing something? do the Anki decks that were on my Ank app desktop not get backed up when doing a backup?? Where else can I go to try to find my Anki decks? Thanks so much!
Thanks for your response! It seems like I am only able to get to those files from my internal hard drive but not when I select my external hard drive.
Here is a picture from my internal hard drive that shows backup Anki decks that were created AFTER my laptop crashed (I believe my Anki decks were much larger than 773 KB) but no Anki decks is showing up before my laptop crashing.
How can I see the backup Anki decks on my external hard drive? When I select Library (from the Go menu while holding down the option key)→ application support → anki2 → profilename → backups, it just takes me to my internal hard drive to view the files but not to my external hard drive.
You can just copy the entire Anki2 folder to your new hard drive / mac. The collection.media folder contains your images, audio, ect. and the collection.anki2 file contains all of your cards and your review history.
Okay so I figured out how to view the Anki 2 folder on my external hard drive. I then opened up the Anki app on my friends Mac and then selected “open backup” from the Profiles window, I selected the most recent back up on my external hard drive “backup-2025-03-30-20.27.49.colpkg” and imported that. It seems like most of my decks were recovered, however, I am not able to see any images that were originally associated with the flashcards. I checked the “collection.media” folder on my external hard drive and it seems like the images are there. When I went to “Tools > Check Media” it said that I was missing 59,963 files. How do I get these images back onto my flashcards??
Copy that entire folder and paste it to your directory in place of the collection.media folder present in your directory. This will delete all other media files which are not there in the backed up folder.
If you have your Anki2 folder, you have everything you need. You don’t need to restore a COLPKG backup file – you’ve got the original in the collection.anki2 database file at the top level of your Profile folder. Copy that entire Anki2 folder to your computer, make sure it’s in the right location, and open Anki. It will show you exactly what you saw the last time you closed Anki – decks, cards, deck options, preferences, even add-ons.
[The one caveat is if you’re using a newer version of Anki than you were before, your add-ons might not be compatible, and you’ll need to do something about that, just like any other time you update version.]
