Originally Posted by
Seattle Forrest
I don't think this is accurate, for two reasons. First, the 800 will resume where it left off if you reboot it during a ride. It still knows what you've done so far, so that can't be stored in volatile memory. Also, saving an activity on an 800 is almost instant, it's faster than saving an activity on a Garmin from last year, as if it's renaming a file and not writing all the data. It might not be a file exactly, it could work more like the t-log in SQL Server.
When the unit is shut off, it likely saves-out a dump of the RAM. That would save every aspect of the current state in a simple way (that's real easy to do). So, there could be a file but it might be a blob that people can't do anything with.
There doesn't seem to be any indication that it's using the file system to store this data (which is either the internal memory or the SD card). If it was, there's no reason it wouldn't just use the name (and the file) the data end up in when things work.
Any recovery (of the sort being discussed here) would require it to be "a file exactly" anyway.
It probably (almost certainly) doesn't work like a SQL transaction log (which isn't particularly fast at all).