Re-indexing response | XM Community
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Hello, I’ve recently created my own survey for my dissertation and I was just having a look around on Qualtrics and accidentally clicked on something. Now when I go to look at my survey responses I cannot see them as it just says ‘your responses are being re-indexed for speedier viewing and will appear shortly’. Are there any ideas on what I can do to fix this? I’m just slightly worried that I won’t be able to access my data again. Thank you!

Hi ellastaines ,
Is this still happening? It's not unusual for responses to be re-indexed after a change is made to the survey, which causes the data to be unavailable for several minutes. But if it lasted hours or days, that is something I would suggest you report to Qualtrics Support.


Hi MatthewM thanks for your reply! It all went back to normal on it’s own a couple of days later


This just happened to me, too -- same scenario -- gathering responses for my dissertation and it suddenly said it is re-indexing and I have no access to my data. It disappeared.
Unfortunately, I asked on the survey for times to contact the folks by phone so I need to be able to see the info. Do you have any suggestions for me, please? I don't have several days to wait.


Reindexing is just the mapping of the survey changes to already submitted answers. It shouldn't take a few days. At max, a few hours (usually it gets done in minutes, unless you have a lot of free text entry and have made a lot of changes).
Even while it is reindexing, the CSV and other downloads should still be available. Even though, I can not say for certain whether it reflects the updated survey or the old one.
This also highlights the need for versioning and creating good version names. It's possible you may be playing around/exploring and trigger some changes. Versions will give you the freedom to revert to a stable/unbroken state.


I'm new and experiencing minutes of indexing time with only 50 responses in a batch of test data.
I also experienced a minutes-long reindex when deleting one record from that same small data set.
Is there a way to speed up the indexing process, or avoid it, especially with small data sets?


https://community.qualtrics.com/XMcommunity/discussion/comment/34605#Comment_34605Yes--is there a way to suppress automatic re-indexing? I'm adding a bunch of bucketed variables (yes, I made some mistakes in designing the survey) and the automatic re-indexing for every single one takes up a lot of time.


Yes I want to turn off the automatic re-indexing too, I have only 25 rows in my data and it takes forever to reindex after each change.


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