I’ve made a lot of edits to my Anking deck including adding new clozes to cards, and I would really like to keep these. So I protected the “text” field before syncing with Ankihub but that resulted in 437 cards with nothing in their “text” fields. Some of these cards are new (creation date 2023) and some are old (creation date 2016); I’m not sure what happened with them and why their text fields are empty. How can I fix this while still preserving the text field for my old cards?
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Hello,
Unfortunately, protecting an entire field via Ankihub tends to be an all-or-none proposition. If you protect that field, which does so for all cards of that deck in your collection, that will by definition allow you to preserve any edits that you make to that field.
However, the way that this allows you to preserve edits to that field is precisely by preventing Ankihub from being able to write to that field. On one hand you can protect changes you’ve made to the card, but this comes with the trade-off of preventing Ankihub from being able to update, or otherwise write to, that same field for any other cards in your collection.
Since, from the sound of it, you’ve already made a lot of edits, there isn’t a handy way to sidestep these basic functions. In this case, it comes down to whether to prevent, or allow, Ankihub to write to the text field generally. If you’re making large-scale changes to your cards, this tends to force a decision one way or the other.
Please let me know if that answers your question, and if there’s anything else I can help with. 
yeah i assumed there might be an issue with getting new cards if i protected the text field but when i looked into those 437 empty cards they’re not all new cards (like some of them have creation dates of 2016). i was using the anking V12 deck prior to syncing with ankihub, so a card with a creation date of 2016 shouldn’t be a new card. i’m not sure why those cards have empty text fields too.
Not sure; could be a peculiarity with whichever deck you were using previously, or some idiosyncrasy of how Ankihub views your collection. Hard to say, really, though the underlying issue will still (likely) be the same.
Let me know if there’s anything else I can do to be of help.
upon further inspection it doesn’t look like ankihub actually protected the text field of all my cards. some just had their text fields deleted. i can see this by comparing my cards prior to syncing with ankihub on my desktop and my cards after syncing with ankihub on my laptop. i can see on my desktop that i edited the text field of a card by adding an additional cloze, but on my laptop i can see that the card’s entire text field was deleted after syncing with ankihub.
It does look, from my end, like you have protected the text field for your Anking Step Deck. You might double-check, but I show that to be the case on my end:
It may be that Ankihub made an attempt to write to that field, for whatever reason, and was unable to do so. I can’t say that I’ve ever seen it happen before, or heard from anyone who has reported it, though I’m not a developer so I can’t rule it out entirely.
You can try to restore from a backup, if you’d like to give it a shot. Restoring from a backup will absolutely restore your collection to a specific point in the past, though it also necessarily comes with losing any review history that you may have managed between that point and now.
Alternately, you can try to reset local changes to the deck though this is unlikely to do much so long as you have the text field protected. But, we can give it a shot if you’d like to try.
Let me know what you think, and what you’d like to do, and I’ll do my best to be of help.