I forgot to mentioned that this survey was created with Limesurvey 3.x. Then the customer updated to version 6.x. They reported that at 3.x they could copy the survey just fine. Only at 6.x the missing label issues shows up.
@DenisChenu, could this be related to the underlying DB adjustments for multilingual surveys?

Didn't know

@tibor.pacalat, can you also reproduce this one? Looks like an underlying major issue to me :-(

@Mazi do you have the original LS3 lss?

The "original" LSS is already broken. The options you mark in the image are not present in the attached LSS of 788158.

Can you confirm the orig_correct.jpg is from LS6?
I mean, can you confirm the options are in place before exporting from LS6?

Also, perhaps the problem is in the XML export and not the import.

@gabrieljenik
RE "do you have the original LS3 lss?" -> No
RE "Can you confirm the orig_correct.jpg is from LS6?" -> Yes, the old 3.x system doesn't exist any more. It was updated to 6.x and the screenshot was taken from there.
RE "can you confirm the options are in place before exporting from LS6?" -> Yes, at least that is what the logic file tells me.
RE "perhaps the problem is in the XML export and not the import." -> Possible!

@mazi

Seems like an export issue.
Can I please ask you to run this? I want to see how the data is store before it gets exported.

SELECT lime_answer_l10ns.* FROM lime_answer_l10ns JOIN lime_answers ON lime_answers.aid=lime_answer_l10ns.aid JOIN lime_questions ON lime_answers.qid=lime_questions.qid WHERE lime_questions.sid=788158 ORDER BY lime_answers.sortorder;

Another possible test, apart from the previous comment, is to export the LSQ of questions P05 and P06. Can you?

@gabrieljenik, unfortunately, I do not have access to the DB at the customer system. But here comes the LSQ file of the requested questions...

@gabrieljenik: I contacted the customer IT and asked for running the query. Please find the results atached.

I am sorry @Mazi. In order to be able to know more, I would need direct access to the DB.
So far, wasn't able to reproduce the issue. Not sure how to move forward.

@tibor.pacalat

@gabrieljenik, that may be a problem. I can ask but I have my doubts that the customer wants to provide this.
Would a backup of the DB before the update (LS3 -> LS6) help?

@Mazi I am sorry, I thought I responded to this earlier, but I guess I didn't. I also couldn't reproduce this, but I thought Gabriel knew where the issue could possibly occur.

@gabrieljenik, we are now facing the exact same issue with another customer. They also updated from 3.x to 6.x and had a larger master survey created at the old version. When copying that survey, answer labels get lost or mixed up, see screenshot.
Please find attached the original master survey #116434 and a copy created (#111111) as LSS files. Though they should be exactly the same, there is a different in size, the copy file size is slightly smaller.
I am also attaching screenshots showing at which parts the copy differs.

file_size.png (5,543 bytes)   

file_size.png (5,543 bytes)   

@gabrieljenik, some further feedback to track this down. The customer did more testing:
"I have also explored further with the new limesurvey instance installed locally on my server. My steps:
I have saved the lss file for 111111 survey and imported it to my limesurvey v6.13.3. the new survey had missing labesls as expected. I have corrected them and then copied the survey again to a second survey. The second suvey appeared ok with modifications.
The above steps do not work on live instance so I think it is s software or version issue.
This is probably why limesurvey dev team cannot replicate the issue."

-> The systems the customers are exporting from are running 6.5.2 and 6.10.2. My guess is that this is not an issue with IMporting the data but with EXporting the data from the older versions.
Could this be the case? Have there been any recent adjustments to the export function?

@Mazi I will try to reproduce this a bit more, but if I can not, I will close this ticket since it is not reproducible.

Advice for the client - When they export the data from 3.x they should try to import it back and see if it is missing there. In that case, since we don't support this version any more, there is also nothing to be done on our side.

@tibor.pacalat: Please try importing the survey #116434 into an older LS 6.5 version and then export from there. That may show the issue when the re-importing the exported survey according to my conclusion.

@tibor.pacalat, were you able to reproduce this?

Hi Mazi, I have looked into this some more and I think the original lss file could be corrupted.
After analysis of the original file
Question P06 is missing option A2 after I imported limesurvey_survey_788158.lss. At least this is your claim. I checked the original file (not imported) and found out that there was no data for this option.
From screenshot you can see what question I am looking at.
The other two screenshots are with options that are in lss file.
The second option does not exist in it. If you want to can check it yourself ( has aid 95660).

Also tested with 6.5.0 and also other survey 116434. Could not see that something goes missing after exporting and reimporting.

Screenshot 2025-06-13 at 17.12.35.png (51,966 bytes)   

Screenshot 2025-06-13 at 17.12.35.png (51,966 bytes)   

Screenshot 2025-06-13 at 17.10.11.png (29,945 bytes)   

Screenshot 2025-06-13 at 17.10.11.png (29,945 bytes)   

Screenshot 2025-06-13 at 17.06.46.png (30,829 bytes)   

Screenshot 2025-06-13 at 17.06.46.png (30,829 bytes)   

@tibor.pacalat, thanks for testing. This really is a mystery. There surely is an issue because two users have reported the same problems after updating from 3.x to 6.x. But it seems very difficult to reproduce.
What do you suggest? Should they adjust their copy of the core survey and then try to create further copies based on the fixed version?

IF there is an issue at all, and not a corrupted data problem - there shouldn't be any issues with copies after the survey in current version is "corrected" (meaning missing options are added).

We did some further in-depth testing with different systems. It turns out that the issue actually seems to be an export problem at outdated LimeSurvey versions. If you import a broken survey into the latest version, add the missing labels and then create a copy, everything's working fine. But if you're exporting the survey at an outdated LimeSurvey version and importing it at the latest version, then the export already seems to be missing some of the labels.
At newer versions the export seems to be working fine.

Ok, thank you for confirming.