Syncing Between Devices

ZKD

举人
Hey Folks,

First, as always, thanks for a killer product.

Second, I haven't checked in a year or two and I figured I'd follow up. As of now, is there any way to sync cards and scorefiles between devices? Currently, it seems like the only way to do it is to continuously export cards back and forth. It's a bit too clunky to do all the time. I'm imagining an Evernote-esque sync function type thing. Any word on that?

Best,

Z
 

ZKD

举人
I want to ask how long this has been around, but I also don't want to know. Too much potential heartache.

You guys rule. Thanks!
 

ZKD

举人
While I'm here, any shot you guys are thinking of a simple data graphing display function for srs activity over time? Even something like # of cards per day or week or whatever over time would be interesting.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
No problem!

I have some philosophical objections to graphs, but nowadays device storage is ample enough that I no longer have any compelling technical argument for why we can't support them, so we probably will be adding them soon.
 

ZKD

举人
Great. I hear your philosophical objects, and I think you make good points about srs with vocab.

Some unsolicited thoughts: Now, I only do full sentence cards--never individual words. All of my cards are ones I've made myself mining sentences from books or TV or movies or news, what have you. Often I take directly from the web or doc reader. I used to take from the dictionary examples, and still do in a tough spot, but the lack of context usually makes it difficult to retain comparatively speaking. Downloading decks of vocabulary or other peoples' sentences always seemed to go against the principles explaining why immersion learning works, particularly with how experienced (or second-hand experienced, via TV) context informs our understanding and integration of a word, phrase, idea, or grammatical point.

People who use the downloaded hsk word or sentence decks have told me they have to in order to pass the test, that they can't do what I'm doing. I passed the hsk 6 in a touch under 3 years of study without actually studying specifically for it. I think that's about the average time for classroom learners, too? Not sure, but it felt like a fine pace and was much more enjoyable than eating raw flashcards.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Context actually is something I'm excited about doing more with - we're tentatively planning to start logging the place where you added a word/sentence to flashcards from, and for words at least to also log the circumstances of subsequent lookups. Even with location, at least on iOS - you'd literally be able to pull up a map of every place you'd ever looked up a particular word.

(on Android, location logging support would probably be Android-6-only, since we don't want people refusing to install our app because they don't understand why we need access to their location - Android only gained opt-in permission support in Android 6)
 

Samsamsam

Member
I know this is an old thread, and also a huge longshot, but is there any way to sync flashcards between Android and iOS? I usually review flashcards on my phone but I read on my iPad, and have tons of saved cards from reading. Any way to do this?

Also, regarding the context idea, have you ever considered saving the context if something was saved from the reader? Like saving the sentence the word came from kind of thing? I would absolutely love that feature, and would buy that as an add on in a heartbeat.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Not automatically, no. We do eventually plan to roll out our own (paid) sync service but that's likely still a ways off.

Reader context saving: that should be coming in 4.0.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
No, actually we don't even recommend that one on iOS anymore (and have removed all references to it from our app product page) because iCloud has gotten too unreliable. We're hoping to eventually launch our own sync service on both platforms (sometime after 4.0 is out).
 

Erik

Member
I am an Android user on tablet and phone. It seems I can "sync" flashcards by exporting and importing. I would also like to sync search history. Is that possible?
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
We've spent a TON of time building the necessary data for syncing into 4.0 - unique identifiers and aggressive modification tracking / deletion logging / etc for everything - but don't plan to ship sync in 4.0 because it would delay the rest of the update too much, so it'll depend on how quickly we get 4.0 debugged + working to everyone's satisfaction on iOS + Android + Mac.
 
Hello

I know this is an old post but perhaps the occasion for an update.

I see that in 3.2.67 on iOS (and iPad) the iCloud sync function for flashcards is still accessible but mentions "deprecated".
Is this because of the planned new feature in version 4?

Is there any known risk in using iCloud or another solution to sync btw devices? (only iPhone and iPad in my case)

In the current state, would cards on both devices be simply fused together?
I only use the "uncategorized" default folder (just using flashcards as bookmarks for words to input later in Anki then delete in Pleco)
so nothing fancy I guess.

Thanks !

Julien
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
I see that in 3.2.67 on iOS (and iPad) the iCloud sync function for flashcards is still accessible but mentions "deprecated".
Is this because of the planned new feature in version 4?

It's because it's unreliable on newer versions of iCloud and we don't want to invest the time in rewriting it when Apple doesn't seem to be developing iCloud sync much anymore (having resigned themselves to the fact that most apps do their own cross-platform sync, I suppose). But we do plan to replace it, yes.

Is there any known risk in using iCloud or another solution to sync btw devices? (only iPhone and iPad in my case)

We automatically back up flashcards outside of iCloud regularly if you're syncing them on iCloud, so the risk of losing data to corruption is pretty low, but it's possible that either a backup would fail and you wouldn't notice, or that some subtle error would creep in and you wouldn't detect it until all of your backups had already been overwritten with new ones. So if you want to be really safe I'd recommend making regular manual backups and copying them to your computer or some other safe stable location.

In the current state, would cards on both devices be simply fused together?
I only use the "uncategorized" default folder (just using flashcards as bookmarks for words to input later in Anki then delete in Pleco)
so nothing fancy I guess.

No, it keeps whichever database is newer, doesn't try to merge them.
 
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