How to Bury, Suspend, and Delete Cards in Anki

Anki’s user interface often leaves much to be desired. Even the most basic functions can be hard to figure out, especially if you are a new Anki user.

This guide explains and clears up the mystery behind Burying Suspending, and Deleting cards in Anki.

Table of Contents

How to Bury a Card in Anki

By burying a card in Anki you hide it from review until the next day. This is useful if you want to temporarily not see a card while reviewing but don’t want to suspend it or permanently delete it.

When you are doing your Anki cards you can click the more button on the bottom right to bring up the menu to bury a card. There are two ways to bury a card in Anki.

You can either bury the individual card or bury the note, meaning that all of the cards associated with that note will be buried.

For example, if you have a cloze card with multiple clozes on it these will each be separate cards. If you bury the note all of the cloze cards will be buried. But if you just bury the card, only one of the cloze cards would be buried and you can still review the others.

Suspending a card in Anki is like burying a card, with one important difference.

How to Suspend a Card in Anki

By suspending a card in Anki, you remove it from review until you manually unsuspend it later. This is helpful if you don’t need to review a card anymore and want to focus on other cards you are still learning but you don’t want to delete it.

You can access this option in the same way that you bury a card. When reviewing your deck click the more button on the bottom right to access the menu.

Much like when burying a card, you can suspend just the current individual card or suspend the whole note (which will suspend any other cards associated with that note).

You can also suspend cards by going into the browser and toggling suspend. This allows you to suspend many cards at once.

This is useful if you have a lot of cards that you don’t want to see anymore, but that you want to keep around for potential future review.

Burying vs suspending cards in Anki

The difference between burying or suspending a card in Anki is that burying a card temporarily removes it from review until the next day while suspending it removes it from review until you manually unsuspend it.

How to Delete cards in Anki

Lastly, you can always just delete your cards in Anki if you don’t want to temporarily remove them from review or suspend them.

You can delete cards in Anki as you go by clicking the more button and clicking delete a note or by just pressing Ctrl + Del.

Keep in mind that this will delete any cards that are associated with the note. For example, If you have 3 cloze cards that you made by creating a note with 3 clozes, this will delete all of them, not just the one you are viewing.

You can also delete cards by going into the browser, selecting as many cards as you want, right-clicking, and pressing delete.

How to recover deleted cards in Anki

If you accidentally deleted a card (or many) you didn’t want to, don’t worry, you can still recover them by accessing backups that Anki creates automatically for you.

Press Ctrl + R to bring up the run menu in windows
Type in %appdata%\anki2 and press ok
Open file User 1 then Backups
You can then open any of these with Anki to restore a backup (preferably the most recent one though).

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Sean

Hello, my name is Sean and I am currently a Cognitive Science student at a Canadian University. My passion for learning has led me to research the ways in which we can optimize our learning as students. I believe that learning should be an enjoyable and fulfilling experience. I am constantly seeking out new ways to make the most out of my learning at university and I write about those things here.