Anki Bury vs Suspend: What Each Does, Every Shortcut

The Short Answer

Bury hides a card until the next day. Suspend hides it until you bring it back yourself. That is the whole difference, and it decides everything else: a buried card returns on its own at the next day rollover (4 a.m. by default), while a suspended card stays out of every review session for as long as you leave it suspended, even for years.

Neither one deletes anything, and neither one resets the card's progress. Both only move the card out of the study queue. Its interval, due date, ease or FSRS memory state, and review history stay exactly as they were.

So the practical rule is simple. If you want the card back tomorrow, bury it. If you want it gone until you decide otherwise, suspend it. If you never want it again, delete it.

All of the above was checked against the Anki manual and Anki's own source code on 2026-09-18.

What Bury Does

Burying takes a card out of today's queue. When the day rolls over, Anki puts it back where it was and it can come up again as normal. You do not have to do anything. The manual describes it as useful when "you cannot answer the card at the moment" or want to come back to it another time.

There are two ways a card gets buried.

You bury it yourself. While reviewing on the desktop, press - to bury the current card, or = to bury every card of that note (for example both the front-to-back and back-to-front card). The same two commands sit in the More menu at the bottom right of the review screen as Bury Card and Bury Note.

Anki buries it for you. A single note can produce several cards, which Anki calls siblings: a forward and a reverse card, or several cloze deletions from one sentence. When you study one sibling, Anki can hide the others until tomorrow, so you do not see the answer to one card five seconds after reviewing its twin. This is switched on in Deck Options under Burying, with three separate checkboxes: Bury new siblings, Bury review siblings, and Bury interday learning siblings.

One detail explains most "why did that card vanish?" questions. According to the deck options manual, Anki gathers cards in a fixed order: intraday learning cards first, then interday learning, then reviews, then new cards. With all burying options on, the sibling that comes earliest in that order is the one you see. A review sibling therefore wins over a new sibling, and the new one is buried. Cards later in the order cannot bury earlier ones, so if you switch off burying for new cards, studying a new card will not hide its review sibling and you may see both on the same day.

Cards still in (re)learning steps are never hidden by sibling burying, because their timing matters too much. Studying a learning card will, however, bury its new and review siblings.

What Suspend Does

Suspending removes a card from review until you reverse it. There is no timer and no grace period. A suspended card turns yellow in the Browse window and stays there, untouched, until you select it and toggle suspend off.

While reviewing on the desktop, press @ to suspend the current card, or ! to suspend every card of the note. Both are also in the More menu as Suspend Card and Suspend Note. In the Browse window, select one or many cards and press Ctrl+J (Cmd+J on a Mac) to toggle suspension on or off.

Anki also suspends cards automatically when they become leeches. Each time a review card is failed, its lapse counter goes up. When it reaches 8, the leech rules tag the note "leech" and suspend the card. If you keep failing it after unsuspending, Anki warns you again every half-threshold, so at 12, 16 and so on. You can change the threshold, or change the action to tag only, in Deck Options under Lapses.

Suspension overrides burying. The manual is explicit that a card cannot be both at once: suspending a buried card unburies it, and a suspended card cannot be buried.

Every Shortcut, by Platform

This is the table most guides skip. The desktop keys come from Anki's review screen code, the browser keys from its Browse window definition, and the AnkiDroid keys from AnkiDroid's own command list. AnkiDroid uses the same four symbols as the desktop when a keyboard is attached.

On AnkiMobile, the Study Tools screen opens from the gear icon while you review. It also offers Mark and Bury and Mark and Suspend, which tag the card as marked before hiding it, so you can find it later with the tag:marked search. Any of these actions can be pinned to the Frequent Actions area by long-pressing it, which saves two taps if you bury a lot.

Where Did My Cards Go? Finding Buried and Suspended Cards

If a deck suddenly shows fewer cards than you expected, one of these four searches in the Browse window will almost always find them. They come straight from the searching manual.

is:suspended finds every suspended card, whether you suspended it or Anki did because it became a leech.

is:buried finds every buried card, manual or automatic.

is:buried-sibling finds only the cards Anki buried because you studied a sibling.

is:buried-manually finds only the cards you buried yourself with - or =.

Combine them with a deck name to narrow things down, for example deck:Spanish is:suspended. To see only your leeches, search tag:leech is:suspended.

To bring buried cards back before tomorrow, open the deck and press u or click Unbury at the bottom of the overview. Press u on the overview screen, not while reviewing: during a review, u is Undo. If the deck holds both kinds of buried card, Anki asks what you want to unbury and offers three choices: manually buried cards, buried siblings, or all buried cards. That lets you restore the cards you skipped on purpose without undoing the automatic sibling spacing.

To bring suspended cards back, search is:suspended, select the ones you want, and press Ctrl+J (Cmd+J on Mac). They become normal cards again immediately.

Does Burying or Suspending Reset Progress?

No. In Anki's scheduler code, burying and suspending only change which queue the card sits in. When you unbury or unsuspend, Anki restores the queue from the card's type, and the card keeps its interval, due date, ease or FSRS memory state and full review history.

There is one side effect worth knowing. Because the due date is kept, a review card that was suspended for three months comes back three months overdue. Anki (or FSRS, if you use it) will treat that elapsed time as real: you will probably see the card on the first day, and how you answer it decides how far the next interval moves. That is correct behaviour, not a bug, but it can make a large unsuspend feel like a flood of reviews. If you are bringing back hundreds of cards, unsuspend them in batches of a few dozen a day.

A Correction to Common Advice, Including Ours

Several guides say that desktop Anki has no single-key shortcut for suspending while you review, and that you have to go through the Browse window. Until today this page said the same thing. It is wrong. The review screen binds @ to Suspend Card and ! to Suspend Note, next to - for Bury Card and = for Bury Note. You can confirm it yourself: open the More menu during a review and each item lists its key.

The second common mistake runs the other way. Some articles describe suspension as a timed pause after which cards return by themselves. They do not. Only burying has a timer, and it is always the next day rollover. A suspended card stays suspended until someone unsuspends it.

A third claim you will see is that pressing b buries or suspends a card. In current Anki, b is not bound to either action. Use - and @.

When to Bury, When to Suspend, When to Delete

The leech row is worth a second look. The leech chapter of the manual says the most efficient fix is to change how the information is presented, not to leave the card frozen. A card that failed eight times usually has too much on it or is being memorised without being understood. Split it into smaller cards, add a mnemonic, then unsuspend.

A habit that prevents lost cards: once a month, search is:suspended, sort by the Due column, and decide for each group whether it should come back, be rewritten, or be deleted. Suspension is meant to be a parking space, not a graveyard.

Why Anki Buries Siblings at All

Sibling burying exists because seeing two cards from the same note back to back turns the second one into recognition rather than recall. The answer is still in your head from a few seconds earlier, so the review feels easy and teaches you almost nothing.

Memory research is consistent on this. A 2006 meta-analysis by Cepeda and colleagues covering 839 assessments found that spreading practice over time beats massing it, across ages and materials. The 2013 review by Dunlosky et al. rated distributed practice and practice testing as the only two "high utility" study techniques out of ten. Pushing a sibling to the next day is spacing applied to a single note: it forces a real retrieval attempt instead of a replay. For more on the principle behind it, see our guide to why spaced repetition works.

If you turn sibling burying off, Anki will show siblings one after the other in many display orders. That can be useful for cramming the night before an exam, but for long-term retention the default of burying is the better choice.

If You Would Rather Not Manage Any of This

Bury, suspend, sibling rules and leech thresholds are the price of Anki's flexibility, and for many people that control is exactly the point. If you use Anki on an iPhone, note that AnkiMobile is the one paid version; our breakdown of what Anki costs on each platform covers it.

If you spend more time maintaining decks than reviewing them, there are apps that set the schedule for you. Mindomax, the app this blog belongs to, uses a six-step Leitner schedule (day 1, 3, 5, 8, 16, 31) that its algorithm adjusts per subject, so there are no sibling or leech settings to tune. The honest trade-off: a failed card goes back to day 1, which is stricter than Anki, and you give up the fine-grained deck options this article is about. Our list of Anki alternatives compares it with the other options.