unable to access accumulated CI3 data

Question

Working with an original CI3 system (which I haven't worked on for several years and which I transferred some of the software to a thumb drive while keeping the system program on the hard drive), I created and tested a questionnaire, made the field disks (thumb drives), gave them to interviews received them back and  seem to have successfully accumulated the field data.  But I can not find the data in the file where the program said it was sending it.  There are respondents on the field disks: script2.DAT size 60.0 kb, Script2.IDX , SSIField, Script2qst, WinQue, QExit.dll (with content).   The size of the Script2 DAT on the target drive is 1KB.  And the date modified is old.  Any ideas?

Answer 1

Indeed, Ci3 goes back many years.  Sawtooth Software hasn't provided technical support for Ci3 for a long time now.  I used to work with Ci3 in the 1990s.  The .dat file is the data file.  The .idx is the index to the data file (which can be regenerated by the Ci3 program if it is lost).  

Check the original field disks (thumb drives) to see what the size of the .dat files is on those (hopefully more than 1KB!).  The accumulated .dat file should essentially be the sum of all the KBs from the field disks.

It's been so long since I've had Ci3 installed on my machine (a decade?  More?) that I cannot remember the dialog for accumulating data and common user mistakes.  But, if the data are on the field disks, then that's good news.

Another thing in the back of my mind is to maybe try running the Tools + Index program to re-index each of the data files on the thumb drives (regenerate the .IDX files).  Then, try the accumulation process again.  I cannot recall, but maybe Ci3 has a hard time accumulating data from field disks if the .IDX files on the field disks have become corrupted somehow.  Repairing the .IDX files might lead to a successful accumulation.

Those are my thoughts for now.

Answer 2

I am very familiar with Ci3 and haven't ever had that problem.  If it says it has successfully accumulated the data then I wouldn't think it's a corrupted file issue but perhaps not going where you think it's going.  I would double check both the path of the source directory (the thumb drives you are using for field disks) and the destination directory which should be the same directory where your ci3 program (.ci3, .qst and .asc) is in a folder on your computer.  After you accumulate and then click finish it should also indicate how many respondents were accumulated.