Data/Study Lost: My student has lost her laptop and the data/study (from last month) is apparently no longer on SoSci

Question

My student did study a month or so ago, but has lost her laptop and she says the data is not on the SoSci system now, after about a month. Is there some way that we can recover the data from SoSci? She has not given me the details and I am not familiar with this platform, but need to know what possibilities there are for recovering/finding this data.
I am very surprised that the data and her study would be erased so quickly, but have not found something explaining how this works or what to do.
I do not have more information, but perhaps someone could tell us what the rules are and what we can do?
It was quite an interesting study.
Thank you for any perspectives/help on this.
With best wishes,

Answer 1

Unfortunately, some people have to undergo the loss of important data before they understand the importance of backups. Duplicati is a free software that automatically takes care of regular, encrypted backups, using external storage (including OneDrive and Google Drive). Please recommend that to your student.

SoSci Survey will delete the data 3 months after the most recent login to the survey project (valid for www.soscisurvey.de). That means the student has either deleted the data themself or has logged in to the wrong survey project.

They shall send me the URL of the project, please, so I could check the logfiles. If the data has actually been deleted, we can try and recover them from the server backups. However, there is al lot of work involved for us, and therefore we introduced a "barrier" few years ago:

• The student can either donate 60 € to a charity/non-profit organization of their choice or
• they can translate a chapter from the SoSci Survey manual from German into English.