unterhausen

I rode 600km over the weekend. Since garmin can't be bothered to make a firmware that actually navigates for that kind of distance, I split the course into 3 courses. I loaded the second course without stopping the timer, just stopping the first course. Then, with the timer at about 28 hours, the device white-screened, as it loves to do. It turns out that you have to stop the timer or it doesn't save the data.

I'm trying to find anything using file recovery. I don't see anything at all in the file system.

So is it impossible to recover this? I'm just trying to track my training stress.

At least it navigated the whole course, which is a bonus

Iride01 

It's unlikely there is anything there to even attempt to recover. I think for the future you ought to consider saving shorter segments of your whole trip. On the 800, like my 500 you stop the timer and reset it. Sure you don't get to track your overall event ride time on the device, but do you really have to see that while you are riding?

TimothyH

The individual files can be combined using GoToes. It works very well.

https://gotoes.org/strava/


-Tim-

unterhausen

just before it crashed, I was thinking it was nice the timer was still going so I didn't have to do any math. I was on a ride with a time limit, so yeah, that's basically one of the most important things it can tell me.

Is stopping the timer really the thing that saves data? That's deeply stupid, and even I don't usually think that poorly of garmin. I already had to split the course into separate files, I figured they would save the data when I stopped the course.

I am not sure why they don't have a "save" button. I guess pressing and holding "reset" is the way to go.

atwl77

The data is probably still all there, just not written into the file table (or whatever header system the Garmin uses for its file allocation). The most important thing now is, until you try to recover your data, do not start up your Garmin and/or attempt to record anything or change any settings as this may make it save onto the areas where your data was written, making it permanently unrecoverable.

Now as far as actual recovery goes, I'm not really sure how as I don't know what sort of storage medium and filesystem the Garmin uses. But I could suggest trying one of the many free SD card data recovery programs that you can find on Google, and/or other similar data recovery programs for PC filesystems. Hopefully one of them will turn out to work.

As for combining files with gotoes, a word of caution as there is a file size limit that it can handle and I suspect long brevet distances are not going to play well with it. Also, from experience, the combined files may not be compatible with every platform. Somewhere early last year I had 3 files that I wanted to combine into a single ride, Strava recognized the combined file but RideWithGPS did not import the file correctly, resulting in some nonsense data that didn't correlate with the route (okay, not really nonsense, just probably out of sync).

BTW as a side note, issues like this that I have heard all too often is one reason I am planning to record with two devices for my upcoming 600K. The Edge 520 is going to be the "clean" recorder: all previous rides and history cleared before starting the ride, and then it stays in the bag only to come out during stops for battery charging. Edge 1030 is going to be on the handlebars, providing route navigation and recording at the same time. If anything should happen to the 1030, I am going to do a stop-and-save on the 520 to ensure that the ride so far has been backed up before restarting both devices again. Of course, hopefully nothing happens along the way and I get two recorded rides for redundancy.

unterhausen

file recovery couldn't find anything that looked like a file, so I guess I'm outta luck. I assume it's writing to the persistent memory all the time, but it wouldn't surprise me if they are doing something non-standard up until the point where they "save" the data.

pdlamb

Did you check both the memory card and the internal memory? Sure, it's a stretch, but desperate times call for desperate measures...

unterhausen

yes, I did. I was also wondering if it is in a temp file somewhere that I don't know about or can't tell what it is, but I don't see anything suspicious from the other day.

I'm sorta resigned to it being gone, and really my whole reason for tracking my training stress is pretty much over for a while. I'm doing a 1200km ride next week and then going into a down cycle for a couple of weeks before I start training again for the 1200km ride I'm doing at the end of August.

njkayaker

I don't think there's a mysterious temp file. I think the device stores the data in memory and has a buffer-overrun problem.

Supposedly, pressing the lap button forces the data to be written to a file.

It's unfortunate that it has this problem but it's an ancient device. It's also a known problem.

unterhausen

It's really the lap/reset button, and to save you have to press and hold it so that you reset the device. If you just press it a short while, it doesn't save. Found that out to my chagrin. Actually went back and read the manual after that didn't work.

I think the newer ones still have many of the same problems. Most people I know don't trust their newer garmins to save data on long rides. Yeah, they work to go out and try to get a few local KOMs. I don't upgrade devices on a vendor's scheduled need for revenue. They moved on before it worked. That's not right. When this dies, I'm buying a wahoo. At least they do software updates.

I heard someone complaining about their 705. Now that is probably a device that should be retired.

Seattle Forrest

I'm sorry I don't have any useful advice. This would bother me to no end. I owned an 800, but I don't know the answer. Well, it sounds like it's probably not recoverable.

I used to work with a PM who would get a functional spec, and read through it, counting the number of clicks each function would take in his head, and send it back to the designer when he thought it was too many. Any time I see something really dumb in a software design, I can see a product manager making a one-off decision without giving it any thought.

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.

njkayaker

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.

Iride01 

No, two steps required..... stop timer and reset it. But you correctly stated it at the end.
I wouldn't go so far as to say "deeply stupid" or even "stupid". It's just how they have done it in all their edge series and other sport and activity devices that I'm aware of. If you read on Garmin's own forums and elsewhere there are some that aren't even starting their timer and wondering why they don't have any data, or others as I've done myself, stop the timer for a lunch break and forget to start it again. I've often wished that their edges and other activity devices would do like their marine chart plotters and handhelds I own and record any time the unit is on. Use the stopping and starting of the timer to just mark the part you actually consider the start and end of your ride. That to me would let you always have data to pull out parts you may have forgotten to start the timer with. But, they don't. I don't know if anyone else does either. So they all must be "deeply stupid". Though it's really just a programming choice of the first development team. Just guessing it's partly based on the days when memory was expensive. My devices that log continuously do overwrite if I fail to save the data off.
Well they do, it is called "reset". Although they try to force it on you more often with the later edges and call it "save", it really is doing the same as the "reset" button. Many don't realize on their later edges that they can ignore the "save" message and go to other screens, turn off their device, or just simply start the timer again to continue the ride. Same exact stuff as the older devices with "reset" Only difference is new device use a prompt on the screen, older devices have a button. Sure there are software code differences, but the user actions are really much the same.

The way you describe doing your timer on your multi day trip should have worked. The problem being whatever was the "white-screen" you mentioned.... low on battery or software exception, There may well be some limits in the code that are being exceeded and throw an exception that is not handled. But being proprietary software, it's up the developers to do that, but the developers are probably doing other higher priorities..

I've ran my edge500 for up to four days before and quite a few stop/starts of the timer too, but never lost data. However I seldom use course navigation or workouts so maybe something in there alters some of the reliability. But I don't think it's the 800 vs 500. You can find posts in all the individual device sub-forums on Garmin's site that express similar frustrations with lost data. If it can't be traced to not starting the timer, then it's similar to your experience.

So that's why I and I'd guess for the same reason others recommend saving your data in smaller segments. Just helps ensure you'll get something. And as @TimothyH mentioned you can combine multiple activities later. If you need to know your total event time at any one moment during a ride, then would a timer on your phone or another device be a safer choice in light of how the Garmin may let you down? My phone actually has a cycling app on it that records everywhere it goes whether I'm cycling or not. It's been pretty accurate for the few times I've pulled the data. Since I'm not using it specifically to record an activity, I have to go into the data and pull out what I want.

unterhausen

resurrecting this again because it happened again. Good thing I did, because I didn't realize to reset, you have to stop the timer. I rode 375 miles again last weekend. I tried to reset at 300 miles, but it didn't work, apparently because the timer was running. It just beeped at me. I logged into garmin connect, and there was the first 230 miles of my ride. It knew about the rest of the ride, but there is no data.

Looks like they improved the data collection substantially, it takes almost 200 more miles before the device locks up hard. Still really bad software design though. Why am I thinking about buying an 830 again?

on edit: hooking it up to garmin express fixed the endless reboot cycle, which is nice.

The white screen is a hard crash. You have to do a factory reset to recover, I think. Going to see if garmin connect will fix it somehow. If it was an exception, they could put in an exception handler, so that's also a deeply stupid design decision. It's really not hard to fix this issue on new designs, they just don't want to. I have heard of people with 1030 that do long rides that have similar problems, and it really has a hard time recovering. People report riding across the country with one course on a wahoo, so I guess some software developers are motivated to do a little simple memory management. Here is a sketch of how to do it: periodically write the data out to persistent memory as a file. Keep a linked list of the files in another file in persistent memory in case you botch a write. Erase the buffer in ram, repeat as necessary. It really would be helpful to have a timer and total miles, no reason to reset everything just so they don't corrupt your data.