How to Retire and Permanently Delete Surveys Content and Data

Overview

This article will show you how to retire your old surveys and archive them locally while removing them from your organization's SurveyToGo account, thus removing them from the Organization tree in Studio.

Retiring a survey creates an archive of the survey, results and attachments, provides you with a download link of the archive, and then removes the survey, results and attachments from the server.

Once the process is complete, the surveys will remain accessible in Studio for 14 days after which they will be removed from your SurveyToGo account. The archive link will remain available for download for an additional 14 days after survey deletion from the server. After this point, the surveys will only be accessible through the local downloaded archive.

The downloadable archive contains:

• Survey as db3 database
• Info xml file containing information on the retired survey (Customer Name, Project Name, Survey Name, etc.) 
• Exports Folder
  • Interviews exported to Excel files
  • Survey srv file
• Result Attachments folder
• Survey Attachments folder
• CAWI Folder containing the CAWI Participants list (if used)

After retiring you can download the above mentioned archive and save it locally.

WARNING: THIS PROCESS CANNOT BE REVERSED. ONCE A SURVEY HAS BEEN RETIRED, IT WILL NO LONGER BE ACCESSIBLE THROUGH DOOBLO AND IS NOT ABLE TO BE RESTORED. THIS OPERATION IS FINAL.

Permissions to Retire

There is a new Organization level security permission that manages access to the Retired Surveys Management node as well as the Retire Surveys option (found by right clicking on a Customer, Project or Survey). This will be set to Full for all users with the built in Organization Administrator role.

Retire Process

Surveys can be retired by either right clicking on the relevant Customer, Project or Survey and selecting the 'Retire Surveys...' or 'Retire...' options:

Then select the surveys you wish to retire and click 'Retire':

You will then be prompted to confirm you would like to retire the selected surveys:

Retired Surveys Management

Under the 'My SurveyToGo Account' node, double click on 'Retired Surveys Management':

This will then show you the history of all retired surveys and their current status, as well as the download link for their archive:

Once a survey is retired, it will remain accessible in the Studio for 14 days (with a dedicated icon next to it). Once the 14 days period is over the survey and its data will be permanently deleted from the servers. 

The downloadable archive link will be available for download for an additional 14 days after the permanent survey and data deletion event (so in the default flow it will be available for a duration of 28 days from the retire action).

Note: If you wish to delete the survey and its data from Dooblo servers before the 14 days period is up you can right click the relevant survey line in the retirement view and select 'Instantly Remove' :

That's It !