Millisecond Forums

Any way to recover unsaved data?

https://forums.millisecond.com/Topic14624.aspx

By SD419 - 10/15/2014

Hello,

I'm pretty new to Inquisit programming and was recently tasked with putting together a pilot study in which we combined a manipulation/IV and measure/DV into a single Inquisit session.  I'd received separate scripts for the IV and DV from others, which I combined into a single script that appeared to work without issue.  The DV task didn't have any data element specified, since the default data recording scheme had previously been sufficient.  The IV, however, contained the following element:

<data>
/ columns = [date, time, subject, trialnum, response, correct, latency]
</data>


Consequently, some of the data from the DV task that we would've liked to have saved ended up not getting saved to the resulting data file.  We've run a few pilot participants across different sessions.  Is there any sort of temporary file that the session's full data is saved to before being transferred to the DAT file?  If not, is there any other way to potentially save the data/variables that are included in the defaults but didn't get saved in this instance (e.g., trialcode, stimulus items)?  Or is the data for these variables permanently lost?

Thanks!
By Dave - 10/15/2014

No, there is no intermediate or temporary data file -- the *.dat or *.iqdat is the only one. It's unfortunately impossible to recover data / variables that have not been recorded to begin with (as per the <data> element's /columns attribute in the given script).

Unless you can infer some of the missing information from the variables that were recorded (unlikely in this particular case, since there isn't much to go on), the data for those variables / those sessions is lost.
By SD419 - 10/15/2014

Okay, that's what I figured, but I wanted to double check that there weren't any options I was overlooking.  Thanks for replying so quickly.