How to Copy an Anki Note With Create Copy
In Anki desktop, select a card in Browse and choose Notes → Create Copy. This opens an editable copy in the Add window. Choose a deck and click Add to save it as a separate note. Its cards start fresh, while the original cards keep their review history. Anki’s Browse menu
Say you already study le pont and want to practice the word in a sentence. You can turn the copy into a sentence prompt and keep the original word pair in rotation.
Copy one note to the deck you want
- Open Browse and select one row. You can start in Cards or Notes mode. In Cards mode, Anki copies the note behind the selected card.
- Choose Notes → Create Copy. The Add window opens with the original note type, fields, and tags filled in. The deck starts out as the current card’s home deck.
- Edit the fields and tags in Add. To put the copy in another deck, click the deck name and choose the destination. For the sentence example, change the Front to Le pont traverse la rivière. and the Back to The bridge crosses the river.
- Click Add. Anki creates a new note and generates cards from its templates. A template with a Deck Override can send its card to a different deck from the one you chose.
Anki’s Add window · Released Browse source · Released Add editor source · How to check a Deck Override
Anki can highlight the first field as a duplicate as soon as the copy opens. It checks that field against other notes of the same type, even in other decks. Changing only the Back leaves the match in place on a Basic note. Give the Front a distinct prompt for a variant, or click Add with the matching text if you meant to keep it. Anki’s duplicate check · Released Add validation
See which cards and reviews belong to the copy
In a test collection, the le pont note used Basic (and reversed card). Both directions were rated Easy once before the note was copied. The sentence version went into French examples with one extra tag.
| What changed | Original note | Sentence copy |
|---|---|---|
| Front | le pont | Le pont traverse la rivière. |
| Back | the bridge | The bridge crosses the river. |
| Tags | chapter_4, french |
chapter_4, french, sentence_practice |
| Deck | French | French examples |
| Note and cards | Same Note ID and two Card IDs as before | New Note ID and two new Card IDs |
| Review history | One review per card, with intervals preserved | Both cards new, zero reviews |
To check your copy, switch Browse to Cards mode and search for its text or a tag you added, such as tag:sentence_practice. Replace the whole search so an old deck filter can’t hide a result. Check the Deck column for each card. You can enable it from the column header’s right-click menu. Anki’s Browse columns
Select a row from each version and open Cards → Info. Compare the Note ID and the review history at the bottom. To see all cards from one note, search nid:123 using its Note ID in place of 123. In the test, adding is:new to that search found both sentence cards. The same filter found zero cards for the reviewed original. Card Info · Anki’s Note ID searches
The note type controls how many cards you get. The standard Basic type makes one, and Basic (and reversed card) makes two even when you start from one card row. Each note has its own field values and tags, but both still use the same templates. A template edit can change how both versions look. Anki’s card templates
To move existing cards and keep studying them with their current history, select those cards and use Cards → Change Deck. To practice the same prompt in the opposite direction, you can add a reverse card to the existing note. Anki’s card actions · How to add a reverse card
AI assisted with research, writing, editing, and the illustration. The desktop steps were checked against Anki’s manual and released UI source. A separate automated test ran the example in a disposable collection using the Anki 26.09.4 backend on macOS.