Importing your Anki decks into Encodr without losing your progress

A lot of people arrive at a new study app with years of Anki decks behind them and a reasonable fear: will importing this mean starting from zero? The honest answer is no, but it's worth being precise about what does and doesn't carry over.

What imports

Your cards come across intact - question, answer, and any card type Anki supports that has a clean equivalent (basic, cloze, multiple choice where applicable). Deck structure comes with them too, so a deck organised into subdecks arrives organised the same way, not flattened into one pile.

What doesn't carry over, and why

Anki's own scheduling data (ease factors, interval history) doesn't transfer, because Encodr uses a different scheduler with its own model of how intervals should grow. Importing a card as "due in 45 days" from a system that calculates due dates differently would be a number with no real meaning in the new system. Every imported card starts fresh in the schedule - but that's a smaller cost than it sounds like, because a card you've already answered correctly many times in Anki tends to be genuinely easy, and it climbs the new interval ladder quickly once you confirm that in the first few reviews.

The part people don't expect: imported decks are usually worth editing

Anki decks accumulated over years, especially shared ones, are full of somebody else's shortcuts - terse cards that made sense to the person who wrote them and nobody else. Importing a shared deck gives you your own editable copy rather than a locked reference, specifically so you can fix the cards that don't hold up on their own. If you find yourself thinking "well, sort of" on an imported card, that's the moment to rewrite it, not push through it - the same rule applies to any card you write yourself.

If you're deciding whether to bother

The main cost of migrating is the relearning curve on scheduling, which is real but temporary - a few weeks of slightly more frequent reviews while the new intervals catch up to what you actually know. The alternative, staying on two systems at once, tends to just mean neither deck gets reviewed consistently. If the decks are worth keeping, it's worth bringing them somewhere you'll actually open.