[radlad]

Watching my med student girlfriend use Anki the past few years has been horrible. The syncing in particular is bad, as you pointed out - and bad in a "irreversible data loss" kind of way.

I've thought about trying to create something better, but Anki itself is so entrenched in some communities that there's a strong network effect - both through shared decks and add-ons. (Also, I don't personally have an application for rote memorization, so someone who does would probably create something better.)

[CodeGlitch]

I use SyncThing [0] to sync my anki databases between a laptop, desktop and a raspberry pi. Fingers crossed nothing has gone wrong yet, apart from problems such as using incompatible versions on the same db.

[0] https://syncthing.net

[radlad]

Thank you for the suggestion - as a med student, she has an iPad that can access certain medical resources, and is already an iPhone user, so I don't know if SyncThing is really an option for her.

I'm not sure that most users can be expected to figure out things like "does this update include a database upgrade?" "which devices are running an old database?" and "what do I do when the software told me the database on disk is corrupt?"

And I think SyncThing would still suffer from the issue of needing to make sure only one device writes to the Anki sync at a time. I really think some sort of cloud service that handles multi-headed sync of cards/notes (and makes it hard to take permanently destructive actions) would be a real competitor in this space - if they can overcome the Anki network effect.

[ehaliewicz2]

What issues has she had? I sync between mobile - macbook -pc desktop every day and rarely have any issues, and all of them have been salvageable. This is over maybe 5-6 years of usage at this point.

[radlad]

IIRC, it's basically just that if she leaves Anki up on her Macbook without explicitly syncing & exiting, and then tries to use her iPhone or iPad, she will lose state on one of the devices.

It's a lot of cognitive overhead to remember not to touch Anki on any other devices unless you've synced and closed it out on the most recently used one.

Since she has a ton of cards, syncing takes a while. And occasionally it just throws a random error.

Moreover, there's a sense of fear every time she uses Anki that she will hit the wrong button and lose her expected state.

[andrewzah]

I agree that this is annoying, but it's also not too hard to build a habit of syncing after every session. It's 'y' by default.

I haven't had any issues after remembering to do that, but I only really use text-heavy decks and not ones with lots of media.

[blakesley]

I totally agree with this, especially the last bit about just the mentality it creates. I wish Anki had an (optional) auto-sync feature (like every 15 mins), but maybe there are too many edge cases for that kind of feature.

[ehaliewicz2]

I suppose remembering to sync is an issue, but I've just built the habit of always syncing when finished. Anki will also sync automatically when you exit (this might be an option you have to enable in the settings).

[aye01]

your comment itself points the huge issue out. the way i see it, as evident in your comment, anki has given you several issue over just the 5-6 years youve used it that requires your to manually salvage your system... what other apps do you do that for?

[ehaliewicz2]

Very minor issues. Once every couple months I'll have forgotten to sync from device A after adding cards, do some reps on device B, realize I'm missing cards, and have to go back and resync.

Only a couple times over my entire usage have I actually had to do a full resync, and it's pretty painless. I just reupload to ankiweb, or download from it, and it's done. This is usually because I've caused some incompatibility via add-ons, or anki versions. But it's always been easy to fix.

>what other apps do you do that for?

I'm not sure what other apps I've used nearly as much as anki. Probably just firefox/chrome and emacs. I've had issues with losing tabs in browsers far more often than losing info with anki. And losing data by not saving in an editor is pretty easily done as well. I'm actually surprised at how well anki will handle changes from multiple sources. Unless you modify the same card on different devices, it pretty much always seems to work as expected.

[aye01]

well I'm glad youre having a good time. you can take a look at the rest of the responses on my comment and see that what i said seems to be a common gripe for many

[radlad]

100% - Anki "does the job" but it has a lot of sharp edges. It's software that users are afraid to use.