For some unearthly reason the KO deck I was 1800 cards away from finishing has rendered itself completely unreadable. There's nothing I can do to recover it

What the hell do I do now?

Are you using Anki and what version is it? If it's the latest, download an earlier version and if it's earlier try the latest version. Hope it all works out~

Did you sync it? Maybe you can re-download it? That's terrible So sorry to hear it.

Do what IceCream said.

Then, turn this into a positive event; buy an external hard drive (and/or a dropbox account) and learn how to backup your stuff regularly.
Data is important and shit happens.

Reading this scared me. I need to back up stuff asap. I thought syncing everytime I used was enough.

IceCream Wrote:go into preferences / settings / saving, and open the backup folder. try to restore one of the backups. glgl

Thankyou! I had no idea about that feature and boy is it a lifesaver! Managed to restore one of the most recent backups and it only knocked me back 50 cards so everything's gonna be OK.

Thankyou once again.

I know that horrible feeling! Same thing happened to me, but like you, I found the backup in Anki, and didn't loose much.

For really important stuff, backup twice on the same setup (two external HDDs of the same type,...). Just in case.

Even if you don't use anki online, always sync. The process sometimes catches errors before they completely wreck your deck. Also regularly run the database checks.

Anki has eaten my deck at least 5 times, but I've always been able to recover from the backups folder, my time machine, anki online, manually hacking at the SQL database, or copying off one of my other synced devices.