I decided to post this question here and not on the official anki forum, I hope I didn't break any rules. I got a feeling that the other forum is for specific problems.

I have been using anki for maybe year and a half, and during that time I've had large decks get corrupted.
It was slightly annoying. One of them was a Spanish deck of 3000 sentences I selected from my reading. However, since I already knew the material well, and it was just a hobby it didn't bother me that much. I simply created a new one.

Now because of an increasing amount of university related material I need to retain for the rest of my life I wanted to start building some long term retention decks.

My question is:
what to do and what not to do to keep the deck alive and running for a long time, preferably years?

I used dropbox to backup my Spanish deck everytime I closed it. I had around 50 backups from the month before it gave me the first error message. Still, it turned out that all of the backups gave me the same error and wouldn't open correctly! My deck got corrupted a month earlier and when it finally decided to die there was no way to save it. I must have updated anki meanwhile, and the new version wouldn't open buggy decks anymore.

I have a Japanese core deck, which gives me an error about once a week after the initial quick scan (new anki does that everytime you open your deck). Full database check seems to be fixing it. Still, I have my doubts about how long it will last.

my ideas so far:
- backup backup backup
- regular full database checks
- be careful not to open anki twice (I think this was one of the suggestions from the original sites)
- don't do anything funky on the computer while doing reviews - crashes are not helping.

any of you anki addicts have something to add?
does the size of the deck have anything to do with it? Should I just create several more annoying small decks to avoid big time data losses?
Are text-only decks more likely to live longer?

thanks in advance

I hate to tell you this, but I think it could be using Dropbox that's causing the problem.

http://groups.google.com/group/ankisrs/b...0bab0de583

I use dropbox to backup my anki folder, but I use a symlink. You might want to try that, as I've been doing it for over half a year without a single corrupt file. It avoids the problem of opening/writing while it's still open, and it still works on all my other computers (I have to wait for dropbox to update, but that's it).

As for my backups, I manually backup my anki folder once a week or so, have my symlink to dropbox, and the anki auto syncing. I figure I'm pretty safe if you also include all the automatic backups and using anki on multiple systems.

hmm back then I had dropbox running in the background all the time. It's true that when you open a deck the dropbox icon shows that it's syncing the file... The sync only ends after I close that deck though.

I suppose that using dropbox after you're done with anki completely (ie after you close the program for good) shouldn't have any negative effects?

thanks a lot, I've never thought of that. Would using anki server sync be a safer option? I never used it because I was under the impression that you can only do that with one deck. I suppose that I was either very wrong or that this was changed in subsequent versions.

what's a symlink? google only turns out things utterly incomprehensible to me
Do you backup deck files separately from media folder?

symlink is a UNIX/Linux term. It is similar to the concepts of "shortcuts" in Windows.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_link

UNIX/Linux also has a related concept known as "hard links". (symlinks are generally "soft links")
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_link

I have only text cards, aside from maybe 10 pictures of animals/plants, so I just backup up everything together.

Symlink is "symbolic link", and I'm 99% sure they have something for Windows/Macs too, but it's probably called something different. It basically works like a shortcut, except the system sees it as the actual file.

I'm interested in this discussion too as the official forums are so huge!

If I have my decks synced on the server and let's say my laptop deck somehow gets corrupted (but my desktop deck is ok) and then I sync my corrupted laptop to the server (will this happen, i.e., can a corrupted deck be synced with the server?) will my desktop be safe or will I need to make sure that I don't sync with the corrupted deck?

also, should I just copy my anki deck files on a usb or something like that periodically?

The current version of Anki checks the deck for errors on startup precisely to avoid the situation of discovering an error and only then noticing your backups are corrupted too. It is possible to recover a corrupt deck in most cases - see http://ichi2.net/anki/wiki/DeckErrors

It is quite likely that dropbox is causing your deck to become corrupt - either because you are using or leaving Anki open in more than one location, your computer is crashing with half-synced changes, or the dropbox folder is not implementing locking correctly.

In the future, please post on the Anki forums. I'm sure Fabrice doesn't want his forum turned into an Anki support center.

thank you for your advice, and I will. Hopefully somebody else benefited from this thread as well.