I installed Windows 7 today simply because I was tired of Vista being total crap.
I put my Anki program (with the folder of course) in my external hard drive and I even tried opening it from my external hard drive just to test. And it worked perfectly and everything was there. So I assumed that it would work when after I had booted my PC with Windows 7 too, but no...

I was almost at 400 kanji, and my progress was exactly where it was suppose to be with the kanji I had missed etc, so the reps would come in the right order.

What am I suppose to do now, what is the best way to go from here? In order to get the program back to the right track. I was thinking of just taking all the 400 kanji in one day to get to where I am suppose to be, but then then all the kanji will pop up at one day.

Thanks.

You didn't have your deck synced with anki online? You didn't use dropbox? Your anki deck is REALLY important, you should have loads of backups of it.

I don't want to sound patronizing but, you do know that just because you copied the program across, doesn't mean you copied your deck across. Are you sure you copied the .anki file across?

You can try looking in your anki backup folder (anki makes backups now and then). I can't remember exactly, but I think it's in the same folder that anki is installed in.

If you can't find it, just suck it up and start again. 400 isn't too bad. Think about what it would have been like if you'd lost a 5,000+ sentence deck 0.o Just remember from now on to make sure you have it backed up all the time. I suggest using anki's online sync and dropbox, as well as maybe some other automated backup software.

Every time I read a story like this I get paranoid again and take an extra measure to back things up.

To OP, an positive way to look at this is that you have learned an important lesson at a time when losing your deck isn't as annoying as it could be. 400 cards in of material that you know you can replace, rather than 400 personal cards you made and have no track of. Having lost it now may have prevented you losing it further down the line.

If it worked before then the data still has to be there. Do you not have another computer you can connect the external HDD to?

activeaero Wrote:If it worked before then the data still has to be there. Do you not have another computer you can connect the external HDD to?

I might as well try it at another computer just in case.

I am glad that the cards were from a download able deck from Anki, so I haven't kinda lost the cards. But I have lost the order my reps where gonna be, which is important to have right.

Well at least I learned from my mistakes now and I won't let it happen again, that is what learning is all about kinda.

Thanks for all the good replies.

Treat your deck like gold! back it up in triplicate, etc. As soon as you get six months, or a year into this process - all the data: cards, reps all represent your knowledge and basically where you are on the learning tree. back up to multiple machines with dropbox, sync regularly, set backups to be on in anki. good luck.

brianobush Wrote:Treat your deck like gold! back it up in triplicate, etc. As soon as you get six months, or a year into this process - all the data: cards, reps all represent your knowledge and basically where you are on the learning tree. back up to multiple machines with dropbox, sync regularly, set backups to be on in anki. good luck.

Agreed. My RTK deck was corrupted once somehow, and I couldn't back it up to before that happened, so I had to start over (was at 1750ish). So I agree, back up a lot*

*A lot here refers to what brianobush said, "Back it up in --------, etc." I just refuse to use the word that is blanked out there ever again because of the JET application.

freezes Wrote:I put my Anki program (with the folder of course) in my external hard drive and I even tried opening it from my external hard drive just to test. And it worked perfectly and everything was there. So I assumed that it would work when after I had booted my PC with Windows 7 too, but no...

The problem here is that the .anki files aren't stored in the Anki program file folder (unless that's where you put the file). I think the default place to store them is in My Documents, but I'm not sure because I don't use the default location. When you opened Anki from your external hard drive, it still opened the .anki file from the My Documents folder, which is why everything was still there when you did that.

The lesson here is, always be aware of where your data is actually stored before you try to back it up... ^^;

- Kef