I am writing this mail with regard to data saving of online experiments. I am running the experiment through my lab account "iiscvisionlab" the experiment name is "SoundParts5b". A participant did the experiment which was 50 mins long and at the end the message appears that there is error in saving data and data is not saved. This has happened 3 more times for me specially for different experiments. It is very disappointing that someone's hour of effort goes in vain.
FYI: I have kept “saving incomplete data” on off mode to save credits when participants are not completing the task.
Sorry to hear that your data is not saving, I had the same problem for a while. I am not sure how you would recover data from past sessions, but I can try to help you avoid this in the future.
Did you try piloting the study online yourself, and if so, did the data appear as you expected?
I know that when I tried my experiment on the PsychoPy program on my computer that the data was appearing fine, but that it did not appear at all while piloting online.
If you pilot it online and the data did appear as expected with you, ensure that the end of the experiment is well defined. That is, if there is a goodbye screen at the end, ensure that it either goes away after a very short time (a few seconds), that they need to press a button like space to finish, or a combination of both. If you do not have this, the participant may have left the experiment thinking it was done but unless the last routine finishes no data will be saved if it is marked incomplete. Nonetheless, I would recommend turning “saving incomplete data” on as it can help prevent these situations, especially because I find that people do not waste credits very often.
Lastly, if you piloted the study and have a defined endpoint and still find that the data is not saving, create a new folder in another location in your desktop and copy the appropriate files into this. Ensure that this new folder contains only the relevant experiment file and stimuli (maybe more depending on what you used in your experiment, but basically anything you need to pull from in your experiment for it to work). Do NOT copy over other versions of the experiment into this folder as this is what caused my problem earlier. Once you do this, create a new online study using this new folder as a reference and try piloting it to see if the data appears as you want it to.
Give these steps a try and see if it works, this is what I did and it worked for me. If you need clarification or still run into problems I can try to help out. Good luck!
Thanks @PSYresearcher - I think this information from learnt experience is really helpful.
For some further context, when we take our data online we enter a whole new world in that the saving of data is also dependant on our participants waiting for the data to save on their end. As @PSYresearcher says, having a really clear end screen can be helpful here.
There are some additional threads also relating to this matter that might be helpful.