I've been working on a deck online on the Anki online interface, then decided I would save a copy to my computer (big mistake). So, thinking that Anki would syncronize a new deck on my computer WITH the deck online, I pressed the sync button. What instead happened was Anki REPLACED my online deck with my new blank deck.

Is there anyway to get the deck back? Has anyone had this happen to them before?

C:\Documents and Settings\<<your user name>>\.anki\backups or
C:\Documents and Settings\<<your user name>>\Application Data\.anki\backups

Edit: Do'h, this is an answer to an entirely different question.

Wow, I just did that the other day and felt like a big dummy. What you are supposed to do is go to File>Download>Personal Deck.

I had the same deck saved onto another computer, so I just re-synced it from there. Hope you can get yours back, too.

btw, how do you do what danieldesu wanted to do properly?
I'm always really scared about installing Anki on a new computer because I think it's gonna mess up my deck

Firstly, you should raise such issues on the Anki forum in the future.

Use File>Download>Personal Deck to download the deck safely. If you set a sync name on a local empty deck and sync it, Anki thinks you want the local deck to overwrite the remote one, so the online deck gets clobbered. It's a bit complicated to prevent this clobbering without either having a prompt every time the deck is synced, or expensive comparison operations. The documentation needs updating however, and I should probably add a note to the 'syncing' video to mention this.

As for getting the deck back, there are weekly backups taken. I can restore the deck to the state it was in last Wednesday, but any changes you made after that will have been lost.

Yeah, I had created it all in the past two days or so. Recreating the cards only took a couple hours, so it wasn't a HUGE loss, but could potentially be devastating. Glad I figured this out early on.

By the way, I appreciate all the work you have put into this program, resolve.

Just today I was looking to see if there were any RtK decks with stories with them.
I accidentally pushed the button to download the RtK deck I already had instead of the one with stories.
It replaced the deck I was just using (I was at 400 or so with some of my own stories added) with the fresh, new, you-have-never-touhed-this-deck one.
I'm using a mac and I don't see the previous file in the trash, and I didn't have an Anki online account yet.
Is it lost forever? 400 is not insanely bad to loose.. but that would put me back a week or so.

A few months ago I was finishing up my reviews and instead of suspending my cards I deleted every card, then closed the deck. (I custom suspend by tags to review only certain groups of cards.) This caused my online deck to be overwritten by my, now, empty deck. I opened my deck the next day and everything was gone.

Good thing I keep 30 backups in the anki\backups directory. Because my two latest backup decks were empty and I made two more empty decks trying to figure out what was wrong.

That was one of the worst mornings of my life. Thousands of hours lost, or so I thought.

[Katsuo]

@ Wills321. On a Mac, Anki makes periodic backups in Users => yourusername => Library => Application Support => Anki => Backups

Perhaps there's something in there you can salvage.

A program should never be able to delete user data without specifically pressing "delete" and then "yes" to a warning. If it is possible to lose data, the program is broken, simple as that.

Updating the documentation will not prevent this, as the use case the OP describes seems totally logical; the user is not at fault!

resolve Wrote:It's a bit complicated to prevent this clobbering without either having a prompt every time the deck is synced, or expensive comparison operations. The documentation needs updating however, and I should probably add a note to the 'syncing' video to mention this.

Fixing this seems trivial to me, without annoying prompts or comparisons. Assuming each deck has a unique identifier, here's how to fix it in each case:

user: danieldesu, crayonmaster
Problem: Newly blank created deck over-wrote old deck online.
Solution: Don't allow a new deck with a new UID to overwrite an ankiweb one with a different UID, EVER. I can't see a use-case where this would ever be useful? Only decks with the same UID online and offline should be able to sync.
Quick fix: don't allow blank decks to sync.

User: Wills321
Problem: Downloading shared deck over-wrote his local modified copy.
Solution: Downloaded shared decks should be saved as a new file, with a new filename if one already exists.
Quick fix: don't allow user to download a shared deck when they have a populated deck open; the operation should only be allowed when you first open a new blank deck, and should be greyed out once it has more than one card/fact.

User: oregum
Problem: accidenly deleted all cards, then synced.
Solution: Pop-up a "Are you sure?" warning when deleting more than one card.

Also the anki automatically backup mechanism is *exactly* designed to prevent this error-case; why were the backup decks also blank?
Solution: Save a backup deck in the backup directory only when a deck has been modified (cards changed, reviews done), not blindly on every sync.

Before offering us your opinions how Things Should Be Done, you might want to investigate a bit more. The first issue has been addressed in Anki 2, the second issue is missing information because if you try it out for yourself in Anki 1.2 you'll see that downloading the same deck twice will not overwrite the first copy, and for the third issue you should read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Humane_Interface on why a confirmation prompt is a poor way of handling user mistakes.

resolve Wrote:Before offering us your opinions how Things Should Be Done, you might want to investigate a bit more. The first issue has been addressed in Anki 2, the second issue is missing information because if you try it out for yourself in Anki 1.2 you'll see that downloading the same deck twice will not overwrite the first copy, and for the third issue you should read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Humane_Interface on why a confirmation prompt is a poor way of handling user mistakes.

Oops, didn't notice this thread was so old! Oh well, glad the first 2 issues have been fixed.

For the third problem, yes I've read The Humane interface (we had a whole UI module based on that book at university).
Raskin's point (too many prompts tend to get ignored by the user) doesn't apply in this case, as mass deletion is a non-frequent event and will generate few warnings. Also his point that a universal undo is a better solution to user error also doesn't apply, as the user can't undo accidental deletions once they've saved, synced and closed their deck (can they?).

I think Raskin's point applies just as much here. Users are conditioned to answer yes to confirmation boxes popping up after an operation and may not take the time to read that they're confirming a delete and not confirming a suspend. And as for universal undo, that's what Anki's automatic backup system is there for - it's not as convenient as a menu item, but it provides a way to recover from mistakes that go unnoticed until the program is shut down.