To be clear: I understand that data does not register in Qualtrics' database until a user hits the "next" button. My concern is from the survey takers' side. If I'm taking a survey that runs across five screens, I might answer the questions on screen 1, screen 2, and screen 3. After completing screen 3, I close my browser and go to lunch. When I come back to the survey in the afternoon, the data I entered on the first two screens will be there because I've hit the "next" button on those screens, but the data I entered on screen 3 is lost because I failed to hit the "next" button before I closed my browser. I'm trying to figure out how to ensure users aren't so consistently losing data they entered on the final screen they accessed before closing their browser. If the "saveProgress" function is enabled on the browser, that seems to solve the problem. But if the function is not enabled, the data is gone, and there's nothing I can do as an administrator to recover it because it never hit Qualtrics' database.

Thanks for raising this. I have a related observation/question: I think the "saveProgress" browser function also records and prevent loss of answers when a respondent navigates backward by clicking a "Back" button (if enabled). There must be a reason for the dialog box that says "We'll temporarily save your work, but answers on this page will not be recorded unless you come back and submit this page" when the respondent navigates backwards in some circumstances, but it is a really problematic feature: I haven't found a way to edit that message, and it forces a 2nd click for each backwards movement (you have to click either "Go Back" or "Stay on Page." In my informal experimenation, "work" is saved when navigating backwards. But I guess this is not the case in some browsers, hence the message?

Forgot to pose this question based on the above: shouldn't any loading of another page, be it the next page or the previous page, save the data on a page??

https://community.qualtrics.com/XMcommunity/discussion/comment/47385#Comment_47385Ideally that's exactly the behavior that we'd see, but it doesn't work that way consistently across browsers. For the sake of argument, let's say I'm accessing a survey link for the very first time. If I'm on a Windows/Chrome combination, I can answer the first question in the survey and then immediately click the little reload button in the browser, and my answer to the first question will still be selected when the browser loads. But if I do the same thing on iOS/Safari, the survey will load to a blank screen. It's really problematic to have such consequentially different behavior across common browsers.
(And I wish I could answer your question CarlR! Frankly, it's something we haven't even considered and that I'm about to look into! We have the "Previous" button enabled on our surveys, so users tend to use that to navigate backwards, but it's occurred to me that I really should test what happens if they use the browser's back button!)

https://community.qualtrics.com/XMcommunity/discussion/21427/data-saving-behavior-is-different-across-different-browsersTo address your third question, I put messages in various places in the survey that tell the respondents their data may be lost on the last page they worked on, unless they hit the Next button before exiting. Most respondents will overlook the messages but at least they can't say we did not warn them. In addition, I try not to put too many questions on one page, so if the browser does not automatically save their responses, at least they're not losing a lot of data.