By far the most common cause of performance issues or crashes is related to the following question: Did you open the project file directly from a USB flash drive, network drive, external hard drive, or cloud-synchronized folder? If the answer is “Yes“, that may be the cause of your issue.

Since MAXQDA is a database program, all changes are continuously saved. It is therefore very important that the connection to the project file is not interrupted, otherwise problems with the project file may arise in some cases. For this reason we recommend that you do not open the project file from a USB, network drive or cloud-synchronized folder, but always copy it to a local hard disk first (e.g. to the desktop). Of course you can save this file to a USB etc., but you should not open the file directly from there. You can read more about this here:

Project data storage

Two error messages are usually a result of this problem:

“MAXQDA cannot open the selected file. The file may already be open, it may not have the correct file format or it may be damaged.”
“The selected file was created with an older MAXQDA 11 version and cannot be opened.“

However, if the file can still be opened, you can use the following steps to set up a new database structure to eliminate possible errors in it:

1. Create a new project file and save it on your local hard disk (e.g. on the desktop)
2. Open it, go to the “Home” tab and select “Merge projects” on the far right
3. Merge the new project file with the problematic project file

This creates a new .mx22 project file with a new database structure, which contains all the existing data.

If the error still occurs, you can send the project file to our Support Team for error analysis or troubleshooting. Please also send the “support file”. You can access this by clicking on the “?” symbol in the upper right corner of MAXQDA and then selecting “Export support file”.