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As you say the schema is clearly not intended for public consumption and closer to a dump of their internal data structures. And people are really protective of their Anki data. My Japanese deck has 11k handmade cards and represents years of progress. I'd really prefer that the devs didn't do dangerous migrations on it!

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[Author here.]

Yes, I agree. I hope I was sufficiently clear about that. My motivations for writing this up were that (1) it's a wonderful example of a lot of things I often find myself saying about databases; (2) peoples' Anki decks are really important to them and I'd like to enable people to work with them if they want; (3) I do hit strange behavior sometimes in Anki and perhaps these issues are behind it.

I hope you're backing up your deck!

Surprise: for me, Anki seems to have lost some data when changing to the 2.1 scheduler—though thankfully I just laughed it off and restored the backup I made immediately before the migration. Will need to repeat the process and figure out what exactly changes, one day.

Of course, usually changing the schema shouldn't lose data, so there's no need to be afraid of it in general.

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