Recovering Missing Data

 Requires Decipher Cloud

While it is a rare occurrence, sometimes user actions can lead to the corruption or loss of data from a survey. This generally happens as a result of removing questions from a survey, deleting data records, or making changes to a survey while it is in a live state. If you have corrupted or missing data in your survey, you can take the following actions to recover those lost records.

1: Restoring Cleared Survey Data

The following instructions applies to projects with delphi="1".

If cleared survey data needs to be restored from a survey, it can be retrieved from the database.

Survey data is cleared if you launch a survey during testing. To restore live data that was cleared when a survey link was sent out in error while testing, use the following steps:

1. Login to the shell and access the correct selfserve/123/456 directory.

2. Issue the command beacon get ./delphi/backups to view a list of old files.

   Example:

    [
               {
               "path": "demo/kitchensink/delphi/data.data.clear",
               "created_on": "2022-07-20T17:02:17Z",
               "bytes": 32768,
               "name": "demo_tkyjb09nhopseh3zs7hfta",
               "records": 42}]

   The above example shows that this backup was created on 2022-07-20 at 17:02:17 and contains 42 records.

3. Verify everything is correct by running:

   beacon get ./delphi/backups/'demo_tkyjb09nhopseh3zs7hfta'

   Note: The name shown above displays the first few records.

4. When you are ready to restore the data, run the following:

   beacon post ./delphi/backups/'demo_tkyjb09nhopseh3zs7hfta'/restore

   Note:  You can only restore the entire data set to its parent directory. You will need to go through and manually delete any unwanted records.

2: Recovering Data in Projects without delphi="1"

The following instructions applies to projects without delphi="1".

2.1:  Recovering Data for a Deleted Question

The following information applies to projects without delphi="1".

To restore data for deleted questions, follow the steps outlined below:

1. Find the version of the XML before the question was deleted.

2. Create a temporary copy of the survey.

3. Download the survey.xml file from the survey version history report, and upload it into your recovery copy.

4. Copy the back-up folder over to your recovery directory.

5. Replace the data folder from your recovery directory with the back-up data folder.

6. Verify that your data and virtual questions were updated properly.

7. Add your missing question to the report of the live survey.

8. Use the generate script to create a file with your restored question data.

9. Using the tabimport script, import your data file back into the live study.

2.2:  Recovering Manually Deleted Records

The following information applies to projects without delphi="1".

To restore data for manually deleted records, follow the steps outlined below:

1. Create a temporary copy of your survey.

2. Navigate to the old-results folder in your main project.

3. Locate the XXX.results.bin and XXX.results.text files.

4. Rename and copy the XXX.results.bin and XXX.results.text files to the data folder in your recovery copy.

5. Use the hmerge command to transfer the restored records back into your main project.