More Garmin woes

George · Post by **George** » 31 Mar 2014 09:44

Some of you may remember (probably with a groan and a roll of the eyes) that I had some issues with my Garmin Edge 500 last autumn. It suddenly refused to power up normally and a firmware update followed by repeated resets seemed to make no difference at first. And then it suddenly DID power up normally and has worked normally ever since.

Until yesterday.

I'd been away for a long weekend's riding and the Garmin was fine as far as the café stop on the ride home. But when I came to leave the café it wouldn't power up. Just said 'Working...' and never got any further. Tried switching if off and on again a couple of times. No difference.

Eventually after wasting about 20 minutes with it, I decided to go for a reset. Last autumn I'd been reluctant to reset at first, because I thought it would wipe all my history. However, it turned out that the reset only wiped profile data and preferences; the history data remained intact. So this time, I went ahead with the reset with few qualms. However, when I got home, I found that a large chunk of history had disappeared: neither Strava nor Garmin Connect can 'see' any activity between 18 January and the time of yesterday's reset.

I am utterly mystified by the whole business.
Why does the thing work normally for months, then throw a wobbly, then work normally for months, then do it again?
Why did resetting leave my history data intact last autumn, but wipe ten weeks' data this time?
Why only ten weeks' data ... why is everything before 18 January still there?

And is my data rescue-able? (Everything up to a week ago had already been uploaded, but it's a shame to lose the last week's data.)

This is primarily a get-it-off-my-chest posting, rather than a seeking-answers posting. I'll be exploring the Garmin forums and possibly contacting their technical people later. But, of course, if anyone does have answers, I'd love to hear them.

laurence_cooley · Post by **laurence_cooley** » 31 Mar 2014 10:12

Mine has frozen on the start-up screen two or three times in the past year and on each occasion, when I've held the power button down to turn it off again, it's emitted a long beep, which I presume is an error message. I find that turning it off and on a few times gets it working again, but sometimes it takes more goes than others. Plugging it in to a computer also seems to help, but that's not very practical if you're mid-ride.

This might be worth a try to see if it can recover the old history files: http://download.cnet.com/Recuva/3000-22 ... 53287.html.

David Cole · Post by **David Cole** » 31 Mar 2014 10:26

Isn't all that data on the Strava and Garmin websites?
Dave

George · Post by **George** » 31 Mar 2014 11:10

laurence_cooley wrote:This might be worth a try to see if it can recover the old history files: http://download.cnet.com/Recuva/3000-22 ... 53287.html.

Thanks, Laurence. I'll look into it all later. At the very least, it's good to know I'm not the only person that this happens to.

David Cole wrote:Isn't all that data on the Strava and Garmin websites?
Dave

Dave, your history data is only on Strava/Garmin/wherever once you've uploaded it. I tend to upload only about once a week, so everything up to and including Sunday 23 is saved, but nothing since.
(I believe that some phone apps upload data automatically when you complete a ride, but Garmins don't do that because they have no independent internet connection.)

Andy Terry · Post by **Andy Terry** » 31 Mar 2014 16:29

I don't know if this will work with the 500, bit I don't see why not. Two possible methods:

1. Plug the unit in and if it appears as a hard drive, copy Garmin/GPX/Current.gpx (or saved track) to your PC. This is what I do on my eTrex 30.

2. Use EasyGPS (www.easygps.com) to download your ride data from the Garmin and save it to a GPX file. This works for eTrex Vista HCx.

You now have your data safe, secure, and under your control.

Now you can upload it to your web site(s) of choice.

George · Post by **George** » 31 Mar 2014 17:29

Andy Terry wrote:I don't know if this will work with the 500, bit I don't see why not. Two possible methods:

1. Plug the unit in and if it appears as a hard drive, copy Garmin/GPX/Current.gpx (or saved track) to your PC. This is what I do on my eTrex 30.

2. Use EasyGPS (www.easygps.com) to download your ride data from the Garmin and save it to a GPX file. This works for eTrex Vista HCx.

You now have your data safe, secure, and under your control.

Now you can upload it to your web site(s) of choice.

Thanks, Andy, but the 500 doesn't work like that. It creates date-labelled .fit files. And all the files for dates between 18-01-14 and 30-03-14 have disappeared (presumably when I reset it, believing that the history data would be unaffected).

Whether you upload straight to a web-based platform and then periodically download data from that platform to your PC (as I usually do) or you save data to your PC and then upload it to a web-based platform (as you recommend), your data isn't backed up until you connect your Garmin to your PC. In this situation, I had no opportunity to connect the Garmin to a PC while I was away (and hadn't bothered to do so for a couple of days before I went away). So I would have lost the last week's data, regardless of which approach I habitually used.

I just don't understand why the reset has wiped history data this time, when it didn't last time, or why it has wiped data covering such an arbitrary period of time.

Andy Terry · Post by **Andy Terry** » 31 Mar 2014 22:06

Right. Sounds like my Forerunner 110 - which stores its .FIT files in the Garmin/Activities folder.

I agree, those files are vulnerable until you can get them onto a PC. Seems you have a dodgy unit, or erratic behaviour is a 'feature' of the 500.

Anyway, if you can hook up to a PC, you can copy the .fit files onto your hard drive, convert them to GPX*, and then upload to Strava or whatever.

Have you tried Recuva yet?

*using GPSies.com, GPSBabel, etc.

petemarshall · Post by **petemarshall** » 01 Apr 2014 09:34

If you want a belt and braces approach you can instal Basecamp (it's free) on your PC. This will backup all the files from any Garmin unit locally as gpx files and also to a free cloud backup.
A reset shouldn't delete history, you usually have to either do this on the unit or with the unit connected to a computer manually. The files will no doupt still be present on the units drive until over written and any file recovery programme will recover them without much difficulty.

George · Post by **George** » 01 Apr 2014 18:36

laurence_cooley wrote:This might be worth a try to see if it can recover the old history files: http://download.cnet.com/Recuva/3000-22 ... 53287.html.

Laurence, many thanks: I finally got round to downloading and installing this, and it turns out to be incredibly easy to use and effective. All last week's files have been recovered. I don't know why I didn't think of using a PC recovery tool myself; a bit of a mental blind spot to the Garmin just being a bit of external storage.

petemarshall wrote:If you want a belt and braces approach you can instal Basecamp (it's free) on your PC.

Thanks, Pete, but I already have BaseCamp and adequate backup. What I wanted was to recover files that I'd had no opportunity to back up.

petemarshall wrote:A reset shouldn't delete history, you usually have to either do this on the unit or with the unit connected to a computer manually.

But it did, and therein lies the mystery. However, I've had enough of puzzling over it now. If the thing ever refuses to power up again, I'll settle for the repeated off-on-wait tactic and leave 'Reset' alone until all else has failed.

George · Post by **George** » 01 Apr 2014 18:48

And the happy outcome: