Hello,

I accidentally deactivated a survey which we are collecting responses for. Naturally, both responses and tokens are unavailable on Limesurvey. However, it should be possible to restore the information, right?

Does anybody know anything about this, I would really appreciate some help.

I have tried these steps I found on the help pages docs.limesurvey.org/Closing+a+survey&str...tions+for+LimeSurvey

Help! I accidentally deactivated my survey - what now?If you closed your survey accidentally it is important that you don't change anything in the survey.
Then, and only then the following steps will work.


1.Activate your survey again
2.Go to the "Browse responses for this survey" menu.
3.Click at the "Import answers from a deactivated survey table" button.
4.Choose your source table.
5.Click at the "Import responses" button.

However, there are no source tables to choose from (I am not quite sure what a source table is either). I have not made any changes to the survey, so that shouldn't be the problem.

Please help if you know anything about this.

Thanks,
Adam

Hello Lichtneckert,

i have had the same problem wich i have resolved with a following quick and easy workaround.
I wasn't also able to import the deactivated survey tables, since the drop down box where empty, no data to chose. Same as you, i haven't changed anything after the survey have been deactivated. So it looks like, this mechanism doesn`t work properly.

How did i fix it.

Quick description: I simply activated the survey from backend, at this point the tables are empty. Searched the old table and inserted the data from old(deactivated) into the active tables. It worked without any problems!

Pre steps:

1) activate the survey from backend
2) look for the ID of this survey, you find it in the URL and need it for the next steps on the DB
3) now you need admin access to the database, where the limesurvey is hosted.

Follow this steps next:
4) connect to the database with a tool of your chooise, for example phpadmin
5) search for the activated table according to it ID
6) than search for deactivated table, this one are marked witch a prefix (old_)
7) if you compare the active with deactivated table, you will determine that, one is empty and one contain your data you look for
8) now insert (all attributes) from old_ (table) into activated (table)
9) after this steps, i found all answers in the table again

I did it with pdAdmin3 since we use Postgre DataBase.

A further hint: to prevent getting your survey data lost, just set start and end date for a survey. than the survey wouldn't be accessable after it expires and you needn't to deactivate it.

But keep in mind, you work with live data, so be cautious.

Espresso, thank you very much for your solution! A colleague helped me to sort it out yesterday, very relieving, but I appreciate your effort to help.

Best regards,