Strava, VeloViewer & Antique Garmin's

[Joe.B]

After being shown VeloViewer by pal at work and being quite taken by the idea of playing Collect-the-Tiles after years of resistance I’ve started using Strava and VeloViewer, beginning with my first ride of the year on the 1st Jan.

Having finally started on the business of square counting I’ve been quite gutted about starting from scratch without any of my previous rides being counted.
Until today that is when I suddenly realised that my trusty old Edge 705 must be chock full of completed rides.

Sure enough there was loads of stored ride data but what’s been interesting is seeing which rides it’s chosen to delete. Nothing recorded before 2013 seems to have escaped the auto cull and disappointingly nothing longer than 160K has survived, which figures I guess as these files would have been larger.  Other rides which have been auto deleted make less sense, it has held on to lots of short / mid distance rides all the way back to 2013 but similar rides ridden just months ago are absent.  Also quite odd is that all the rides recorded from Tandem Club rallies in France and Germany have gone while the UK rally routes remain.

Anyway, can’t sit here all evening complaining about antique Garmin’s, I’ve got tiles to bag.   

[Kim]

Salvaging data from old GPS logs is a great way to bag tiles while hors de combat from actually riding.   

I don't think I ever left anything un-backed-up on the Garmin, though, on account of their propensity to unfortunately timed filesystem corruption.  I'd habitually copy everything to a directory of raw GPXes from time to time in case I ever needed to go digging for something.  (These days I have a script that does that automatically before uploading to Strava.)

[Joe.B]

Now that I’ve become more interested in electronically tracking my rides I’ve bought a Garmin smart watch which will automatically back-up everything.

The biggest PITA after up-loading all the rides that were saved on the Edge was having to edit out all the train journey’s. When I was in the Navy I’d often ride to Newcastle Station, get off the train in Glasgow and ride to Helensburgh, I’d do the same when going to Portsmouth, Plymouth and Barrow.  Though the Garmin was always shut down on the train I didn’t ever reset the counter when arriving at my destination station, I’d just press start and carry on.  Strava filled in the gaps by plotting a straight line from Newcastle to the various destination stations.  I had to edit out several dozen of these straight lines. 

[TimC]

The 705 was a great device - to the extent that I changed the battery in mine twice, and replaced a couple of the microswitches, but its memory was tiny and not backing it up is/was A Mistake. Garmin Connect solves that poblem these days, if you don't want to use Strava, RideWithGPS or one of the other third-party recording sites. Like with all computers, un-backed-up data is extremely vulnerable, and it costs nothing to do it.

But, Joe, I'm afraid that using these devices becomes much more useful if you read the manual first!

[Joe.B]

Agree that it’s a great device, I've been using mine for 11 years so no complaints about its robustness.

To be fair I had read the manual and I'm quite proficient with the devices various functions, or at least with the ones that I use. The thing about downloading history is that until very recently I wasn’t interested in doing so, it’s only after getting the bug for tile collecting that I’ve started to care.