Title: Data Loss
Last modified: August 22, 2016

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# Data Loss

 *  Plugin Author [Will Brubaker](https://wordpress.org/support/users/willthewebmechanic/)
 * (@willthewebmechanic)
 * Automattic Happiness Engineer
 * [11 years, 4 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/data-loss/)
 * Version 1.6.3 was just released. It attempts to mitigate the data loss that some
   users have been experiencing. For more information see this post: [http://www.willthewebmechanic.com/to-the-users-of-the-awesome-surveys-plugin/](http://www.willthewebmechanic.com/to-the-users-of-the-awesome-surveys-plugin/)
 * [https://wordpress.org/plugins/awesome-surveys/](https://wordpress.org/plugins/awesome-surveys/)

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

 *  [Ken Brucker](https://wordpress.org/support/users/draca/)
 * (@draca)
 * [11 years, 3 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/data-loss/#post-5657680)
 * I’m searching for a survey plugin and found yours. Must admit, I haven’t tried
   it since I’m planning a survey that will ideally get 500-1000 responses so haven’t
   wanted to jump on the boat here given the data loss issues. I suspect that your
   issue will be related to how much data you can stuff into a single option field.
   You could run into a similar problem with your move to store the survey data 
   as a blob in post meta data.
 * There’s also some risk of data loss of individual responses with your present
   method if several people are attempting to respond at the same time. You could
   have a couple threads running at the same time, both issue get_options, update
   the value and the last writer will win.
 * In my mind, this use case screams for a new table in the DB to manage the response
   content. It would make the survey completion more scalable as more users respond
   as adding individual responses will require less data to move around. You could
   also devise a method of storing individual responses as post meta data to avoid
   a new table. Whichever you choose, I strongly recommend a solution that treats
   each response as a unique record in the DB so your plugin scales better.
 *  Plugin Contributor [Toby](https://wordpress.org/support/users/tobyhawkins/)
 * (@tobyhawkins)
 * [11 years, 2 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/data-loss/#post-5657689)
 * If you read the first link in Will’s post, that’s exactly what he’s planning.
 *  [Ken Brucker](https://wordpress.org/support/users/draca/)
 * (@draca)
 * [11 years, 2 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/data-loss/#post-5657690)
 * It does seem that’s the general direction and I misread one particular phrase
   in his post. I initially had the impression that he was planning to simply store
   all responses for a particular survey (post) in one post_meta blob.
 * From a database performance perspective, I suspect (but can’t say for certain)
   that it will be better to create a new table to hold survey responses. Still 
   go with a post per survey, however use a table definition with a tuple like (
   response_id, post_id, response). Each post would have multiple such records where
   response is the data for a particular respondent.
 *  [brittsantowski](https://wordpress.org/support/users/brittsantowski/)
 * (@brittsantowski)
 * [11 years, 2 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/data-loss/#post-5657710)
 * The first link in Will’s post returns an error:
 * Not Found
 * The requested URL /to-the-users-of-the-awesome-surveys-plugin/ was not found 
   on this server.
 * Apache/2.4.7 (Ubuntu) Server at [http://www.willthewebmechanic.com](http://www.willthewebmechanic.com)
   Port 80

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

The topic ‘Data Loss’ is closed to new replies.

 * ![](https://s.w.org/plugins/geopattern-icon/awesome-surveys_f9f9f9.svg)
 * [Awesome Surveys](https://wordpress.org/plugins/awesome-surveys/)
 * [Frequently Asked Questions](https://wordpress.org/plugins/awesome-surveys/#faq)
 * [Support Threads](https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/awesome-surveys/)
 * [Active Topics](https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/awesome-surveys/active/)
 * [Unresolved Topics](https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/awesome-surveys/unresolved/)
 * [Reviews](https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/awesome-surveys/reviews/)

 * 4 replies
 * 4 participants
 * Last reply from: [brittsantowski](https://wordpress.org/support/users/brittsantowski/)
 * Last activity: [11 years, 2 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/data-loss/#post-5657710)
 * Status: not a support question