Closing a survey
From LimeSurvey Manual
General
To stop a survey, you can either "expire" or "deactivate" it.
![](/images/thumb/f/ff/Important.png/20px-Important.png)
Expiry
You can manually expire the survey if you edit the survey details and set an "Expiry date/time":
![](/images/2/23/Publication_%26_access_panel.png)
Alternatively, when trying to deactivate the survey (by clicking on the "stop this survey" button), an option to expire the survey is provided, which performs the same function:
![](/images/1/11/Expiry_and_Deactivation_-_Survey.png)
If you decide to expiry your survey:
- No results are lost
- No respondent information is lost
- Change of questions, groups, and parameters is limited
- An expired survey is not accessible to participant (they only see a message that the survey has expired)
- It's possible to perform statistics on responses inside LimeSurvey
To make the survey available to your participants again, change or remove the expiration date from the publication & access panel.
Deactivation
Click on "Stop this survey" button located on the top toolbar:
![](/images/9/99/Quick_start_guide_-_Stop_this_survey.png)
Once loaded, click on the Deactivate survey button:
![](/images/1/11/Expiry_and_Deactivation_-_Survey.png)
- All results are lost (you cannot access them via the LimeSurvey user interface)
- All respondent information is lost
- The deactivated survey is not accessible to the respondent (a message will be displayed stating that you are not permitted to see this survey)
- All questions, groups, and parameters are editable again
- It is recommended to export your responses before using this option
Help! I accidentally deactivated my survey - what now?
If you closed your survey accidentally, it is important that you don't change anything in your survey. To recover your data:
- Activate your survey again
- Select Responses from the survey toolbar.
- Click on Import and select the "Import answers from a deactivated survey table" menu entry.
- Choose your source table.
- Click on the "Import" button located on the upper-right part of the screen.
![](/images/thumb/f/ff/Important.png/20px-Important.png)
![](/images/a/a4/Import_deactivated_table_into_a_new_survey.png)
Currently, LimeSurvey detects and handles the following changes:
- Question is moved to another group (result is imported correctly).
- Question is removed from target (result is ignored).
- Question is added to target (result is set to database default value).