You cannot append rows into SXSSF workbooks. The method the retrieve the number of already existing rows returns only the current created rows and not the rows already exists if the workbook is read from a file. I have already solved this bug and would like to contribute a patch to the project. The necssary changes affects only the class org.apache.poi.xssf.streaming.SXSSFSheet
Please attach the proposed changes or create a pull-request at https://github.com/apache/poi so we can take a look if it is generally useful to change things here.
I have created a pull request: https://github.com/apache/poi/pull/600