Lost Survey Submissions

Question

Hello

I have a user who submitted 5 surveys for one of my published surveys that has been in use for years.  On June 15, 2026, this user hit submit and the surveys just disappeared.  They aren't on the server or the tablet that was used to submit them.  The survey in question does not have the sent items enabled, just the Inbox.

We pulled the sqlite file from the device and placed it on the computer.  We opened it up only to find that the surveys were not part of it, so no recovery.  These surveys were part of an inspection, and I can't have this happening.

Any ideas on how I might be able to recover these surveys?  What steps may I have missed?  I followed ESRI's instructions for recovering surveys through the sqlite file as stated above.  It didn't work.  Any suggestions would help.  Thank you.

RalphPlummer · Answer

Hi @TylerGraham2

I had the user share their tablet screen with me to be sure it wasn't there yesterday.  As you stated, they weren't anywhere in the sqlite database either.  After pulling the sqlite database and not finding them, I had the person go in and fix the database to see if that would do anything and then pulled the sqlite database again.  Same results.

I went to the ArcGIS REST Services Directory for the feature service, and it looks like all is lost.  I only have add and update records enabled, so no shot someone deleted them.  I also have it set to where the user can only see his or her records.

The strange part is this person submitted multiple surveys that day, but just 5 of them went into the abyss.  The version of the survey that was used was the same as what is published.  This is the first time this has occurred out of my 25+ surveys with over 30k submissions in the past 6 years.  I guess I can be happy about that.  😕

I thank you for the suggestions and will report back if I ever do find out what caused this to happen.

TylerGraham2 · Answer

They aren't sitting in the survey's outbox are they?  However, since you pulled the sqlite database and they aren't anywhere in there, it's not promising.  Did they hit submit and they disappeared, or did they get a successful submission and then the data disappeared?  You might submit a support ticket if you haven't already.

You can also go to your feature service's Rest Directory and Extract Changes. If they were submitted to the feature service and then were deleted, the data should show up in there. Here's a guide on how to do that.  If you have sync enabled though you won't have access to the add features operation, but you can still get the data and manually re-enter it.

https://support.esri.com/en-us/knowledge-base/faq-can-an-overwritten-feature-layer-be-recovered-in-ar-000033505

It's been a long time since I've had survey data disappear and it was usually caused by mismatched versions of the survey between what was on the device and what is published, or possibly wildly different versions of the software. Also, if your settings allow for users to delete records it is possible someone may have done that.  It would be a good time to double check your settings in AGOL, Survey123 website, and Connect (if you published it from there).  Make sure "use latest version of this survey" is enabled. Make sure Survey123 Connect and Survey123 are all up to date. Use the Analysis tools in Connect to update the XLS form too.