Windy in Shanghai, ALL my flashcards are gone

I am preparing for HSK 3. I have a flashcard file for each HSK level that I was feeding as I was learning. Then I had the idea to create a test in which all three files would be selected as well as an other one on interesting terms. The total was about 950 entries. I know this is hefty, as the HSK 3 is only supposed to have 600 words. I chose to revise all the cards, so that if I make sittings of 50 cards, in about 20 sessions, that is in a week if I did 3 sessions a day, I could go over the whole thing. I launched the test. Then I noticed it was windy. So I looked out and then saw on the news that there is a typhoon between Taiwan and the mainland.

Then I got back to my test. And my screen says: no flashcards. I look again, quit, turn off the iPhone 4s, relaunch everything. To no avail.

I went to my mac, and this is when I became mindless and rather stupid, I should say. I connected the iPhone to the mac, went on to do a search on how to restore erased flashcards which told me if I got it straight that I should reimport the exported database which is, er... about 6 months old. Meanwhile the Pleco backup was going from the iPhone to the mac, which means I let it copy its "emptiness" into iTunes. Of course, when, 3 minutes later, I decided to do a restore from iTunes to the iPhone, the empty flashcard file was copied back.
So now it is all gone. I do not know if it is the wind, but I feel kind of numb. At least I see my dictionaries being reimported from iTunes.

More technically, I wonder if is the size of the test or something else that caused the loss. I do not believe I can retrieve the lost stuff except may be from a month old Time Machine (but how to do that). I wish that helps preventing future occurrences. That does not lower in any way my appreciation of Pleco of which I will remain a faithful user and vector.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Were you using iCloud sync? If so, go into the Pleco "Settings" screen / "Flashcards" - is iCloud sync now turned off? If so, turn it back on and - very important - choose the option to use the database that's in iCloud rather than the one on your device; that should bring back your flashcards.
 
Wow, you made my day! This is perfect. Thank you so much :) !!!
One second they were gone, the next they were back. Amazing!
Cheers
Stephane
 
Again! But this time I do not think I did anything wrong. I got a new iPhone6, restored the whole thing, downloaded all my purchases, went to the flashcards (there were empty) then did the iCloud restore (yes, I wanted to get the stuff from the cloud, not the device) and nothing, nothing, nothing.
Is there any way to get my flashcards from the iTunes backup? thanks (iphone 6, latest versions of everything: Pleco, IOS...) and mac book pro with Itunes 11.4.
 
Yes, you are right, I had not done it. there was a message that said that the restore had been done, but since I had not enabled iCloud with the new phone, nothing had happened in reality. Wew, Thanks for that again :)
 
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