updating a deck

updating a deck

Postby kraemder » Sat Oct 12, 2019 2:06 pm

I've had a bit of a frustrating experience this morning trying to add a lot of cards to my Korean Sentence deck and I wanted to just say something just in case it's something I could have avoided.. ugh.. I hope it never happens again.

While copying and pasting the sentences from How to Study Korean (a good website for Korean studying), I made a careless mistake somewhere along the way and put a sentence into the Sound 1 column. I was adding over 300 sentences and I didn't know it was just one sentence or what at the time and spent large amounts of time proofreading it to find the offending 'sound' file without a sound file extension. I did find the one mistake and fix it and save it to Dropbox and attempted to download it again numerous times but the same error message. Dropbox was going very slow today which didn't help either. Anyway, I finally just gave up and deleted the deck off my app and downloaded the updated deck from Dropbox that I was attempting to use to update my deck on my phone. It downloaded fine. It seems there were no errors after all. I can only guess why the app kept giving me the error message. Now I have to start the deck over from scratch and it's gonna be a lot of work.

If this happens again do you have any tips?
Last edited by kraemder on Sat Oct 12, 2019 3:16 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: updating a deck

Postby kraemder » Sat Oct 12, 2019 2:32 pm

Ok I just want to say that I decided not to start over. I just marked all the cards strong correct without reading them and staggered the interval time so it’s not all at once. It’s not too terrible but if this happens again any tips would be good. I hate to lose progress. I’ve been doing this deck very aggressively and it was over 500 cards but only for a week. The progress isn’t too big of a hit. What’s weird is that although I’ve had the frustration of making a careless mistake or two creating cards in the past, once I finally did fix the mistake, it updated fine.
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Re: updating a deck

Postby Ernie » Sat Oct 12, 2019 6:13 pm

Hi kraemder,

I'm sorry to hear about your trouble. I really don't know why flashcards would download when creating a new deck, but not when updating an existing one. If you were still having the problem, I would be interested in seeing the error message you were getting, to see how helpful it was or was not. You could have also sent me your file and I can take a look.

Another thing you might have done is export your existing flashcards, including statistics. This would give you a backup of your current flashcards with their statistics data. I might have been easy then to add your 300 new sentences to the bottom (copied from your prior work) and then try adding that back as a new deck (will maintaining your statistics).

So one problem is, why didn't the error message guide you better to the problem? The other is, why does it seem like you could add as new deck but not update? In the future, I'd like to get involved to see if we can figure out, maybe with me trying also on my end.

One explanation might be that Dropbox was slow to refresh to their server after you making the fix, and it wasn't until just before you deleted and added the new deck that Dropbox finally got the update. Not sure.
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Re: updating a deck

Postby kraemder » Sat Oct 12, 2019 6:49 pm

If I use the synch function then that will basically store a backup of the decks in case something goes wrong right?
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Re: updating a deck

Postby Ernie » Sat Oct 19, 2019 8:45 pm

Correct. There are two syncs:

Sync to Dropbox - this is currently the only shown option by default. After turning on, both the full database and updated individual decks will be exported to Dropbox each time you close the app. Depending on the sizes of database and text files, you may want to just turn on one or the other so not so much data is exported each time you close the app.

Sync to my App Server. This is a new option if you turn on "beta sync" (see below). This will backup to my servers, and should be more efficient by exporting less data (e.g. only cards that were changed, not entire decks or databases).
To enable: Global Options > View > Advanced > Enable Beta Sync. Turn on.
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