Anki: corrupted database

08 Apr, 2026 • 204 words • 1 min • updated 22 Aug, 2026

Life is hard. Today, when opening Anki on macOS:

DbError { info: "SqliteFailure(Error { code: DatabaseCorrupt, extended_code: 11 }, Some(\"database disk image is malformed\"))", kind: Other }

Database corrupt? What is this, are we in the 2000s? Goodness.

I have automatic backups enabled. For 4 years I haven’t needed them. Today is the day. Never say never!

     shell
     
   
% ls -lt "$HOME/Library/Application Support/Anki2/Thiago/backups/"
total 234496
-rw-r--r--@ 1 tperrotta  staff  3911921 Apr  8 00:12 backup-2026-04-08-00.12.17.colpkg
-rw-r--r--@ 1 tperrotta  staff  3911921 Apr  7 00:16 backup-2026-04-07-00.16.26.colpkg

I try:

     shell
     
open "$HOME/Library/Application Support/Anki2/Thiago/backups/backup-2026-04-07-00.16.26.colpkg"

…but apparently that file is corrupt as well.

I am not particularly worried because I sync my notes to AnkiWeb. Even if the entire local collection were corrupt, my flashcards are in the cloud.

So I decided to simply start from scratch¹.

     shell
     
   
mv ~/Library/Application\ Support/Anki2/Thiago/collection.anki2 ~/Library/Application\ Support/Anki2/Thiago/collection.anki2.corrupt
rm -f ~/Library/Application\ Support/Anki2/Thiago/collection.anki2-shm ~/Library/Application\ Support/Anki2/Thiago/collection.anki2-wal

Then I open Anki.

It prompts me to download my decks from AnkiWeb.

And now everything works as usual! Last cleanup:

shell

trash ~/Library/Application\ Support/Anki2/Thiago/collection.anki2.corrupt

No idea why this has happened. First time. Life goes on.

!next

Previously. ∎

The idea was mine. The decision was mine. The LLM suggested the command on how to do so. I can still self-troubleshoot, mmmkay? ↩︎

Backlinks

anki: auto-sync (Apr 12, 2026)

¬ just serendipity 🍀 (not just serendipity)