Download your data before switching your experiment to inactive
When running an experiment on Pavlovia, the files exist on two separate servers.
This is where files get uploaded when you sync from Builder.
A copy is created here when you activate a study (change to Piloting or Running).
Participant data is initially stored on the run server and then transferred to the GitLab server.
If you download data from the project page you are downloading from the run server. N.B. If you are saving in database format then only the log file gets transferred, and data can only be downloaded from the project page.
If you change your experiment to inactive then it gets deleted from the run server along with any data stored there. This isn’t usually an issue, but if for any reason the data hasn’t transferred to the GitLab server this would result in data loss.
Therefore download your data from the project page before setting the project to inactive. You can switch it to piloting to prevent additional participants from launching it.
It is good practice to delete old experiments from the run server by switching them to inactive, but do not be hasty. Check you have all of your data first, and don’t assume that everything has been transferred to Gitlab automatically.
N.B. If you add the data folder to .gitignore, it will stop data being added from the run server, as well as from your local data folder.