Adventures Randomly Deleted after Power Cycle Fixed?

Former Member over 11 years ago

This past week I was doing an 8 day back country off-road motorcycle trip through the Oregon desert. For primary navigation I was using my Garmin Montana 600 (4.7) which was synced via BaseCamp 4.2.2 on OSX 10.8.4 I broke the trip up into 5 adventures, each one with anywhere from 4-10 tracks and 20-40 waypoints. The Adventure feature was working brilliantly and I couldn't have been happier until day 5 when I awoke and found an adventure missing from the device. I named them "Rt 3", "Rt 4", ..., "Rt 7" and it had deleted "Rt 3". This freaked me out a bit so I rebooted the device only to find that "Rt 4" was now missing. Since I was riding "Rt 4" and had 3 more day to go on the subsequent routes I decided to leave the GPS on for the remainder of the trip. Sadly the battery didn't make it through the night so I lost all subsequent routes over the next few days. I was the route planner and had to fallback to my iPhone, forest service maps and another rider with us who had a backup copy of the tracks in order to get out of the desert.

I've seen other forum posts on this topic but haven't seen any conclusion as to what causes the problem and if a software update is available to address it. When I returned home I connected my GPS to my computer and confirmed that the adventure files and associated tracks/waypoints were completely gone from the device memory. I realize I'm a bit behind at v4.7 and am upgrading to v5.3 today. If anyone can tell me if this issue was addressed between 4.7 and 5.3 I'd appreciate it, or if any solution like a master reset is considered enough as I haven't found one in the forums yet.

Thanks in advance.

0 PSEABOLT over 11 years ago

Sorry I not much help but to clarify for others that might be more help, are you not talking about Trips as opposed to Adventures?

0 azdrmn over 11 years ago

Sorry to hear about your problems, though glad to hear that adventures were working for you...up to that point. I believe there was a change in a recent Montana firmware update pertaining to adventures, but I can't swear to it. I'm forwarding this to the Montana dev team.

0 Former Member over 11 years ago

Sorry to hear about your problems, though glad to hear that adventures were working for you...up to that point. I believe there was a change in a recent Montana firmware update pertaining to adventures, but I can't swear to it. I'm forwarding this to the Montana dev team.

I have had similar issues back at Montana v4.7 but v5.30 seemed to be working OK. There appears to be a BaseCamp issue with transferring Adventures to a device. Even though BC shows the Adventure has been transferred and you can see the Adventure and it's data while the device is still attached, BaseCamp is not always writing the Adventure File in the /Garmin/Adventures/ folder. All of the data is in the appropriate data folders: GPX, JPG, etc.

I have had this happen on my Montana 650 v5.30 and on another device.

0 Former Member over 11 years ago

This past week I was doing an 8 day back country off-road motorcycle trip through the Oregon desert. For primary navigation I was using my Garmin Montana 600 (4.7) which was synced via BaseCamp 4.2.2 on OSX 10.8.4 I broke the trip up into 5 adventures, each one with anywhere from 4-10 tracks and 20-40 waypoints. The Adventure feature was working brilliantly and I couldn't have been happier until day 5 when I awoke and found an adventure missing from the device. I named them "Rt 3", "Rt 4", ..., "Rt 7" and it had deleted "Rt 3". This freaked me out a bit so I rebooted the device only to find that "Rt 4" was now missing. Since I was riding "Rt 4" and had 3 more day to go on the subsequent routes I decided to leave the GPS on for the remainder of the trip. Sadly the battery didn't make it through the night so I lost all subsequent routes over the next few days. I was the route planner and had to fallback to my iPhone, forest service maps and another rider with us who had a backup copy of the tracks in order to get out of the desert.

I've seen other forum posts on this topic but haven't seen any conclusion as to what causes the problem and if a software update is available to address it. When I returned home I connected my GPS to my computer and confirmed that the adventure files and associated tracks/waypoints were completely gone from the device memory. I realize I'm a bit behind at v4.7 and am upgrading to v5.3 today. If anyone can tell me if this issue was addressed between 4.7 and 5.3 I'd appreciate it, or if any solution like a master reset is considered enough as I haven't found one in the forums yet.

Thanks in advance.

When you lost the Adventures, did you look in the Waypoint Manager and Track Manager to see if the data was still there?

0 Former Member over 11 years ago

Well, that is indeed very strange behavior for a GPS. I've never had a unit just arbitrarily delete data and in a complete context like that since the unit would have to delete specific Adventure files in at least two locations. As for reliability, I think you'll find most people have found the Montana to be quite reliable. Most, not all, of the problems I have encountered myself and helped others with have been due to the user and/or BaseCamp sending bad or incomplete data to the Montana. In your case, I would consider updating your Montana to the latest software. But, I still encounter issues with BaseCamp and Adventures data being transferred incomplete to several units I have; I just cannot nail down the root cause.

By the way, whether you change devices or not, if your travel data is that critical, I would strongly suggest carrying a back device & data. In my case, I always put my data on the microSD Card and I always carry a backup card configured exactly the same way. That's no guarantee that you'll be covered if the unit does have issues but...

Good luck.