"Save and Continue Later" – participants unable to resume survey

Question

Hi everyone,

I'm running into a recurring issue with the "Save and Continue Later" feature and would appreciate any help.

What do you have to do for this error to occur?

1. A participant starts the survey and completes several pages.
2. They click "Save and Continue Later" and receive a resume link.
3. They open the resume link later to continue.

What would you expect?

The participant resumes from the page where they left off, with all previous answers preserved.

What actually happens?

The participant gets the following error (translated from Polish):

"The survey cannot be continued. Loading previously submitted answers has failed. Your survey may have been deleted – or completed surveys may have been retrieved and removed in the meantime. Unfortunately, it is not possible to continue this survey."

Some context

• Project: test519728
• This has happened to several participants on different occasions.
• The survey is quite long — participants often need multiple sessions to complete it.
• We've just finished a pilot study and are preparing for a much larger normalization study, so I need this feature to work reliably.

Has anyone encountered this before? Could it be related to data retrieval settings, session handling, or something else I might be missing?

Thanks in advance for any help!

PS: I also reported this as a bug via Soscisurvey form.

Answer 1

This error message occurs if ...

• the URL is incorrect or
• you deleted the data or
• the respondent clicked the link on the first page, and you did not disable deletion of empty interviews in the project settings -> privacy