How does avalanche recovery work?

Avalanche recovery distributes all of the cards you have today over the next number of days depending on your review threshold. This smooths out your reviews so that you're not faced with an enormous pile one day and a miniscule one the next. 

For example, if you have 100 cards due today with a threshold of 25, activating the recovery will distribute these 100 cards over the next 4 days such that there will be 25 each day.

If you already have cards waiting for you the next day, recovery will distribute today's cards up to the maximum for that day and then find a day further down the road to add to. Should you encounter a situation where you trigger avalanche detection on subsequent days, you will again be presented the option to use the recovery function to rebalance your reviews.

When a card is distributed using avalanche recovery, it will be indicated by an Avalanched Card tag. 

The option to 😭 these cards is removed in order to prevent an unending loop. You will be required to select from either 😐 or 🙂. The tag will be removed and the card will revert to normal the next time you encounter it.

Remember that reviewing your cards for today will queue them for some date in the future, so it's possible that your future dates will have more than 50 reviews even after using recovery. In this case, if the number of reviews is below your avalanche detection percentage, it will proceed as a normal day where you just have exceeded your review threshold. That is, you will only have reviews for the day and will not be assigned a new unit. If the reviews once again exceed the avalanche detection percentage, you will receive another prompt allowing you to activate recovery again to smooth out your reviews.

As a caveat, if your reviews are an excessive amount, for example 2000, with a review threshold of 50, recovery would force you into review only days for 40 days. This is quite a long time and it's likely that you would have forgotten a lot of the material contained in the reviews. In the cases where recovery would exceed a month timeframe, it will prompt you to increase your review threshold such that the timeframe for getting through your reviews is decreased.