Restore deleted notes

Rationale

Sometime, you realize that you have missing notes. Personnally, I lost 5000 notes, and I took months to realize that there was this error. Those notes can be found in the file deleted.txt in anki's folder.

This add-on allow you to import again the notes from deleted.txt. More precisely, you should first copy paste the lines corresponding to the note you want to get back, into another file, and then import this other file.

Note that it won't import card back. There is currently no way known to me to do that. It means that all cards will be new. Note also that those notes will have lost their tags.

This is really a bad add-on, and you should first try to figure out whether you have the missing note in some backup somewhere. This is a last recourse add-on.

To find the notes created by this add-on easily, it adds the tag NoteBackFromDeleted to cards imported.

The creation date of notes is kept (but not the creation date of card)

Usage

First, use the add-on manager to edit the configuration of this add-on. In front of "file", put the adress of the file you want to import. By default, it's called deleted.txt and is assumed to be in your home directory. But you'll probably have to change this, in particular if you're not on a unix system (linux, mac os x, bsd)

Then in the main window, do "Tools>add back". You'll have a message telling you how many notes were imported and whether there were notes which were not imported.

Warning

Tab

deleted.txt is a very bag log. For example, it separates every fields with tab (\t). But you can have tab in your field. Which means that it is literally impossible for the add-on to know whether a tab separates fields, or belong to a field. So as soon as a field will contains a tab, the importation is going to be wrongly done and you'll have to correct it by hand.

Modified note type

If you have modified the note type after the deletion occured, and before you use this add-on, then the import will give a wrong result. Indeed, it will import what was the first field in what is currently the first field, and similarly for every other field.

Luckily, however, you can correct this later by selecting all imported card, and changing their note type, which allow you to move fields from one position to another one.

Note generating no card

Sometime, a note generate no card. When it occurs in the «add card» window, you get a warning. Here, I force the generation of the first card, and I add the tag "NoteWithNoCard". You then get a warning telling you that you should find those note and edit them quickly. Otherwise, those notes will be deleted as soon as you press «Empty cards...»

Note already present

Sometime a note is in deleted.tx, but in fact was not deleted. May be you did cancel the deletion, or you imported the note again from somewhere. Anyway, if a note from your file has the same id than a card in your collection, then this card is not added, and an error message is written.

This mean in particular that if you import twice the same file, you'll still have a single copy.

Missing note type

If you have deleted the note type, the note can't be imported. Instead, you'll get an error message telling you the list of id of note type (known as mid) which are missing.

It's hard to tell you what to do in this case, because it's quite complicated. May be you should change the mid of those cards to the id of note type which already exists. You'll have the data in anki, even if it is in bad place. You'll have then to manually decide what to do with those cards.

Medias

Sorry, but deleted media are not saved anywhere. So if your card add media, it won't be back.

Technical details

A line is supposed to encode a note type if it starts by two numbers with at least 6 digits, each numbere followed by a tab. Otherwise, it is assumed that the line represents the end of the preceding line, and that a field of the preceding line contained a new line symbol.

Version 2.0

None

Links, licence and credits