I’ve been getting into road cycling for several months now and along the way I’ve been using Garmin devices to track my progress. I started off with a Garmin Forerunner 305 but got a Garmin Edge 500 soon after they came out as it seemed like a perfect device for cycling. I’ve loved these devices from day one and highly recommend them to anyone considering them.

In all, I’ve tracked hundreds of activities (rides, runs, etc.) with these devices so far and have never had a single problem–until  yesterday. I participated in the Livestrong Seattle 2010 event and rode the 45 mile route. It was the first time I participated in an organized ride of any sort so it was a bit of a big deal for me. Naturally, I used the Edge 500 to track the ride. We looked at some of the data after crossing the finish line and then I went through my regular routine: hold down the reset button, wait for the 3..2..1 countdown, and see the numbers all zero out. I do this all the time at the end of every ride I’m on.

When I got home, I hooked the device up to my computer and headed over to Garmin Connect to upload the ride’s data. I was a little confused when it reported back that there were no new activities to upload. I checked the history via the actual device and found that the most recent ride I had data for was my last training ride from a few days prior. It’s as if the ride’s data was deleted. Not good–not happy.

Frustrated, I gave up. Today, however, I figured I’d experiment a little and am happy to say I managed to recover the data. In case this happens to anyone else, here are the steps I took to reach my happy ending. Hope it helps:

  1. Connect the Garmin device to your computer via the USB cord.
  2. Power on the device and you should hear the USB connect sound.
  3. Launch your undelete software. I use Active@ Undelete but I suppose similar products would likely work just as well.
  4. Browse to the device (seems to be called “GARMIN”) and do an “Advanced Scan.” A “Simple Scan” may or may not work but I figured I’d be patient and wait for the advanced one just in case.
  5. Once the scan completes, you should be able to expand the “Garmin” node to see (possibly) many deleted folders with names such as “_739345_”. Ignore those and scroll all the way to the bottom (may be off screen).
  6. Expand the “Garmin” folder and then click on the “Activities” folder inside of it.
  7. In the files pane over to the right, you should see a list of all the activities you have on your device. They all follow a date format followed by time and use the “.fit” file extension. Look for the one that doesn’t match that pattern and is called “current_activity.fit”.
  8. Right-click “current_activity.fit” and select “Recover.”
  9. Tell it to save the recovered file to your desktop and call it “recovered.fit”.
  10. Now, assuming the file is not corrupt (mine wasn’t), you need to upload it to Garmin Connect. Head over to the site, click on “Upload”, click the “Manual Upload” link at the bottom of the page, browse to the “recovered.fit” file you just saved on your desktop and click the “Upload activities from file” button.

If you were as lucky as I was, you should be sitting there with a smile looking at a screen full of numbers you want to improve on next time.