Bury vs suspend in Anki: what each does and when to use it

Burying a card in Anki hides it until the next day: it drops out of today's session and comes back on its own once the day rolls over. Suspending hides a card until you unsuspend it yourself. Neither deletes the card. Bury a card when you can't deal with it right now; suspend it when you don't want to study it for a while but want to keep it.

Bury

Choose Bury Card (or Bury Note, for all of the note's cards) from the More menu while studying. The card disappears from today's session and comes back after the day rolls over. To bring buried cards back sooner, use the Unbury button at the bottom of the deck overview.

Anki can also bury cards for you. Cards made from the same note, like a front-to-back and back-to-front pair or two clozes from one sentence, are called siblings. With sibling burying on, answering one card hides its siblings until tomorrow, so the first doesn't give away the second. Deck Options has three switches, under Burying:

• Bury new siblings
• Bury review siblings
• Bury interday learning siblings

Anki never hides cards on short learning steps, because their timing matters. Studying a learning card still buries its new and review siblings.

Suspend

Choose Suspend Card or Suspend Note from the same menu. A suspended card stays out of every study session until you unsuspend it. To do that, open Browse, search for is:suspended, select the cards and use Toggle Suspend.

The card keeps its scheduling while suspended. If its due date passed in the meantime, it comes back as overdue.

A card that reaches 8 lapses is tagged as a leech, and if the deck's Leech action is set to Suspend Card, Anki suspends it as well. What is a leech in Anki explains what to do with those.

Which one to use

A card can't be buried and suspended at once. Suspending a buried card unburies it.

Both take cards out of a session. To study more than your daily limits instead, use custom study.

Common questions

What's the difference between Bury Card and Bury Note?

Bury Card hides only the card in front of you. Bury Note hides every card made from the same note, such as both directions of a vocabulary pair. Suspend Card and Suspend Note work the same way.

How do I bury or suspend a card with the keyboard?

While studying in Anki on a computer, press - to bury the card, = to bury the note, @ to suspend the card and ! to suspend the note. The same actions are in the More menu at the bottom right.

What do Toggle Bury and Toggle Suspend do in the browser?

They're in the Browse window's Cards menu and work on the cards you've selected. Toggle Suspend (Ctrl+J, or Cmd+J on a Mac) suspends them, or unsuspends them if they're already suspended. Toggle Bury (Ctrl+Shift+J, or Cmd+Shift+J) does the same for burying, which is how you bury or unbury a single card without studying it first.

How do I find buried or suspended cards?

In Browse, search is:buried for every buried card, is:buried-sibling for the ones Anki buried automatically, or is:buried-manually for the ones you buried. Search is:suspended for suspended cards; the browser also shows them with a yellow background.

In Decks

Decks doesn't have bury or suspend. The daily limits in Settings control how many cards come up each day, and to remove a card for good you delete it from the card editor.