The raw category values used in the .sav file are not stored in the Metadata Model (MDM) document. When you export to a new .sav file, the category values are sequential and start from 1 (unless you specify settings as described in Variable definitions when writing to a .sav file). In many .sav files the category values start at 0 and are not sequential. For example, .sav category values of 0, 1, 2, and 9 are common. This is why the category values in your export do not match those in your original .sav file. The only way to make the category values match the ones in your original .sav file is to export to the original .sav file. However, this will not work if the structure of the data has changed.

Note that this would not be a problem if your original .sav file had been created by using the SPSS Statistics SAV DSC, or if you had set up the category values in the .sav file to match the native values (that is, sequential integer values starting from 1).

By default, multiple-response categorical variables are exported as multiple dichotomy sets. However, multiple response questions sometimes ask respondents to select a limited number of the responses from the response list. For example, in a survey about films, a question might ask you to select your 3 favorite films from a list of 20 films. When this happens the maximum value (that is, the value of the MDM variable's EffectiveMaxValue property) is set to 3, which is less than the total number of categories (excluding any categories that have the flUser flag set, such as Don't Know). When this happens the multiple response variable is exported as a multiple category set. See "Multiple-Response Categorical Variables" in Variable definitions when writing to a .sav file .

To force the SPSS Statistics SAV DSC to export all multiple-response categorical variables as multiple dichotomy sets, use the CategorySet Properties and settings used by the SPSS Statistics SAV DSC.

IBM SPSS Statistics string variables have a limit of 255 bytes in IBM SPSS Statistics 12 and earlier, whereas the .sav files created by the SPSS Statistics SAV DSC are compatible with IBM SPSS Statistics 13 or later and do not have this limitation. Therefore, your .sav file probably contains string variables that are longer than 255 bytes.

By default, there is no limit to the number of attempts that the SPSS Statistics SAV DSC makes to create each unique alias name. It is possible that this has caused your export to stop responding. You could try stopping the export and setting the value of the AliasRetryLimit property to 1000, for example, and then attempting the export again. If the number of retries is too small, the export will fail with an error message similar to the following: