Urgent Support Request – Lost Student Submission Records in Space

Hmm… This is only a community-level diagnosis, not an official support answer.

HF Spaces data is basically ephemeral unless you explicitly persist it somewhere. In plain terms: if the Space restarts, stops, or rebuilds, files written only inside the running container can disappear, and they may not exist anywhere else.

From the public code, this looks like data written only to the Space’s local runtime filesystem, not data committed to the Hub repository.

In particular, the app appears to save submissions to a local CSV file:

csv_file = os.path.join(BASE_DIR, "submissions.csv")

and the Excel report appears to be generated from that CSV at download time, rather than being a separately persisted Excel file in the repository.

So, unfortunately, if the submissions.csv file existed only inside the running Space container and then disappeared after a restart/stop/rebuild, I would treat it as not recoverable from the user side.

If recovery is possible at all, it would likely require something only Hugging Face infrastructure/support could check. I would not rely on recovery being possible, but I would still email website@huggingface.co with as much information as possible:

• Space URL: https://huggingface.co/spaces/Deevyankar/specialization_allocation
• approximate time range when the submissions existed
• approximate time when they disappeared
• whether the Space was restarted, rebuilt, paused, slept, or updated
• whether any commit happened around that time
• screenshots, logs, or downloaded reports if any still exist
• the expected file name, likely submissions.csv

Why this is the likely explanation (click for more details) What I would change for the future (click for more details)