[aoanla]

Yeah, I've had the same thing every time I have tried Anki - it's fine for a while, but once you get enough cards added, or just have been memorising a deck for long enough, even missing one session generates a huge unsurmountable backlog. It's bad and consistent enough for me that I just stopped trying to use Anki at all.

[colin_jack]

FSRS seems to reduce the amount of reviews required, might be worth enabling it and seeing if it helps.

[Swalden123]

Is there no way to skip a day? And simply pause?

[Jtsummers]

You can suspend cards and decks, but also you can skip days.

It'll create a backlog of cards to review, but that's surmountable. The number can become intimidating (I think my worst was around 2k cards), but there are a few ways to clear it. You can "just" get back into the daily habit, it'll take (by the default numbers, if one deck) # cards/100 days to clear out, more or less (some cards may come up for review again in that period so the actual number might be a bit higher). You can also up the daily review limit to clear it faster (I did this when I hit 2k, 200/day was about my personal time limit to spend on it so it took just over 10 days to clear).