[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).