This might be related to a problem on AnkiWeb’s side that Damien just discovered. I already flagged this issue for him, so if it’s that, he’ll be able to help.
I can tell you that right now your AnkiWeb account still has all of the media, so you will be able to recover from this.
Between your phone, your AnkiWeb account, and your computer – which ones are in sync and the most current?
If you made an APKG or COLPKG backup on your phone, including scheduling and media – yes that is one way to restore things on your computer. You mentioned that was a few hours behind sync, so I didn’t suggest it.
When you say that’s not working – what do you mean?
You could also use that export to restore all of the media on your computer, without impacting your database –
- Copy that export file from you phone to your computer
- Import it into a new (temporary) profile on your computer.
- Go to the folder for that new profile, open its
collection.mediaand copy all of the files there. - Go to the folder for your main profile, and paste those files into your
collection.media. - You can delete the temporary profile when you are done [and it will be several GBs in size, so you will probably want to].
When you launch Anki again on your computer, run Check Media, and you should see that the files are now there. That should get you up-and-running until Damien has a chance to take a look at your AnkiWeb account.