LimeSurvey version: 5.x (Community Edition)  
Own server or LimeSurvey Cloud:
Own server (self-hosted, University of Innsbruck installation)
Survey theme/template:
Default LimeSurvey theme (no custom template)
LimeSurvey Community Edition  Version 6.15.4 
Hello LimeSurvey community,I’m using LimeSurvey Community Edition (self-hosted) and ran into a problem with already collected data.What happened:

• I collected several responses.
• Before exporting the data for the first time, I changed answer options in a multiple-choice question.
• After exporting the data, the MC responses were missing in SPSS.
• I managed to restore almost all data by re-entering the old answer codes manually.
• However, free-text responses (text input field shown conditionally after a specific answer option) are still missing in the export – those cells remain empty.

Problem:
I can no longer find the old answer option ID / label that this free-text field was linked to.
Unfortunately:

• I overwrote the question syntax,
• I cannot find any previous version,
• and I cannot locate any document that stores the former labels.

My question to the community:

• Is there any place in LimeSurvey or the database where old answer labels / IDs might still be stored?
• Is there any way to recover the text responses if the answer option they were linked to was changed?
• Or are those text entries irreversibly lost once the corresponding answer code changes?

I’m already very happy that I could recover most of the data — it’s really just the written text answers I’m still hoping to retrieve 🙂Any ideas or experiences would be greatly appreciated!Best wishes
Liane

Hi,
so during the fieldwork you realized that you need numerical codes to be able to do some statistical tests.
Means: You did not do a full test. 
And you changed the old "AO01" or whatever to "1", "2",...
How did you do this?
You deactivated the survey, changed the codes and activated again? Then imported the "old_answers"?
Here is the crucial point. LimeSurvey has to rely on the codes to merge the answers.
Anyway: There should still be a data table with the original answers.
Maybe your admin can help investigating the "lime_old_survey_223575_xxxx"

Always remember: In single punch questions like arrays this code is stored as the respondent's answer. If you change this code in the survey structure, you expect LimeSurvey to go through all responses in the answer table to change from old code too new code.

If you export to SPSS anyway, this is done better in SPSS. A simple RECODE and a switch of the scale (from "text" to "ordinal").
This statements you may add directly to the syntax file. Done.

Well, you decided to do it the hard way. And you were more or less successful.

But now your question about conditional text questions.
I could reproduce that nothing is stored.
Have a look at your equation "gleichung"
 
You see the new line and the <p> tags.

This means you do not store "1" or "2", but "1   " or "2   ", each number followed by three blanks.
Now the conditions gleichung==1 resp. gleichung==2 will fail, because "gleichung" contains neither "1" nor "2".
A correct condition would have been gleichung=="1   "

Unfortunately LimeSurvey behaves weird.
The question were displayed (the programming language neglects the type error), but the storage does not.

But anyway: Gone is gone.
Du weißt es ja: "Backup ist nur für Feiglinge"
Warum nur hast Du nicht vor den Änderungen einmal exportiert?

Joffm