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.
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.
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.
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).
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?
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.
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
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.