Deactivate Survey

Deactivate Survey

Deactivating a survey

  1. On an active survey, click the red Deactivate button on the top toolbar.
  2. In the "Do you want to stop your survey?" dialog, choose Deactivate survey.
  3. Click Continue.

The dialog also offers Stop / pause survey, which only ends data collection: it sets an expiry date and keeps responses and participant information available for statistics.

What deactivation does

  • Responses and participant information are archived — not deleted — but are no longer available for analysis, so export your responses before deactivating.
  • The survey becomes inaccessible to participants (a message indicates the survey is no longer available).
  • You can add, edit, or delete questions, question groups, and settings again.

Reactivating a deactivated survey

After deactivation, the toolbar button becomes a green Activate again. When you reactivate, the activation flow lets you import the archived responses into the new response table so you can continue where you left off. If you edit questions in the meantime, archived responses are merged into the new table only where the structure still matches, so export your responses before changing the survey structure.

Related Articles

    • Related Articles

    • Close Survey

      Closing a survey To close (end) a survey, you can either "expire" or "deactivate" it.   Attention: We strongly recommend using the expiry option to close a survey. The reasons are stated below. Expiry You can manually expire the survey by setting an ...

    • Activate Survey

      Activate survey By activating a survey, LimeSurvey: creates a separate database table where all survey responses are stored, a new entry being added for each new collected survey response. allows survey administrators to manually enter data into that ...

    • Overview: Activate your survey

      Activating a survey takes it live: it stops being an editable draft and starts accepting real responses. Before you activate Preview first. Click the eye icon and walk through the survey exactly as respondents will see it. Finalize your structure. ...

    • Activate your survey

      This article covers activation in detail: what to check first, what happens when you activate, and how to stop and reactivate a survey safely. For the short version, see the overview article ("Overview: Activate your survey"). Before you activate ...

    • Overview - Activate Survey

      Overview – Activate Survey Before you activate a survey, note that: When the survey is initialized, you can change the text for questions, answers, the survey etc., but not the type of question or the type of answer. You cannot add new questions or ...