Which area best matches your request?
Data Management
Which KoboToolbox server are you using?
Global Server (kf.kobotoolbox.org)
How was the form built? (If applicable)
KoboToolbox Online Form Builder (GUI)
What are you trying to achieve or report?
Attempting to review data from completed surveys - Surveys have been deleted.
What’s happening instead?
We have an issue where five surveys have lost all submitted survey data following an update to their sharing permissions.
We believe this may be a KoboToolbox system issue or glitch caused by copying sharing permissions from a ‘draft’ Project.
Explanation of issue:
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After completion of surveys, all surveys were archived.
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Sharing permissions of the archived surveys were updated using the “Copy team from another project” feature. This feature displays the warning: “This will overwrite any existing sharing settings defined in this project”, so should only impact sharing permissions of a project. The sharing permissions were copied from a draft survey (see below).
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While the sharing permissions were successfully updated, this action also resulted in all existing survey submissions being removed from the five affected surveys.
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In addition to the missing data, the affected surveys appear to be experiencing other issues: (a) Several options are no longer available on the Summary page of each survey (e.g. Edit form, Share project etc). See blue circle in image below. (b) The Data and Settings tabs are greyed out and cannot be accessed (see green circle in image below).
The Submissions column in the main survey page also no longer displays the number of submissions (it would be expected for there to be a ‘0’ indicated for no submissions).
It appears that copying sharing permissions from a draft survey causes a glitch to the affected survey, including removal all survey submissions.
Please can someone advice on the following:
- Is this a known glitch
- Can the missing submissions can be recovered. Perhaps the data still exists, but is not visible due to the glitch.
- Whether KoboToolbox has a backup or other copy of the affected submissions. The data loss was on 30/09 so perhaps could be recovered from a temporary backup hard-drive
Thank you for the help
Did you search the forum for existing solutions before posting?
Yes, I searched and couldn’t find a solution
