Backup and restore: file size and processing time

Former Member over 12 years ago

Hi there,

Until recently I used to put all my tracks (a few hundred of them) in one single instance of Basecamp. They were all arranged in lists and folders by country, region, etc. I also make regular backups (File > Backup) of the database; the backup file has grown to over 100 Mb. The backup process takes 5 to 10 minutes. (BTW, my computer's performance/specs are not the bottleneck in this).

So I decided to spread the tracks over several files, one per country. To achieve this I deleted the tracks of all countries except one, created a backup (say Country_1.backup), restored the original backup file (with all countries), repeated the process for country_2, and so on.

What surprises me, is that each backup file still has a size of about 100 Mb, regardless of the number of tracks in it. Even if I delete every item (waypoint, track, route, etc.) I am stuck with a backup file of 100 Mb.
I could step over this, if it weren't that switching from one country to another (which means restoring a backup file) takes at least 10 minutes.

Is this normal behaviour of Basecamp? If not, what can I do to solve the problem?

0 Former Member over 12 years ago

Hello Falagar,

If you delete photos in BaseCamp, they should get deleted. There seems to be an issue, I'll take a look.

After deleting the photos in BC they were no longer visible/present in BC

To bring down the size of the backup, you can delete all folders but the 4.0 folder in %APPDATA%\Garmin\BaseCamp\Database\ (C:\Users\{username}\AppData\Roaming\Garmin\BaseCamp\Database).

I only have a 4.0 folder on my computer. I deleted the 3.x folders in an earlier stage following your advice.

Also, check the C:\Users\{username}\AppData\Roaming\Garmin\BaseCamp\GeotaggedPhotos folder. Do you have a lot of photos in there that are not present in BaseCamp? If so, you can delete those as well.

This folder did have a lot of photos in it, total size over 1.5 Gb. After deleting these files a created a new backup file with a size of 117 Mb.

I wonder why the GeotaggedPhotos folder is not 'synchronized' with the photos in BC itself. But that is for your developers to decide. Anyway, thanks for your help.

0 Former Member over 12 years ago

I had the same problem.
My first backup was 2MB. After put around 700 tagged photos, my backup became 1,5GB.
I deleted all photos that BaseCamp showed, but the problem is the same: long time and amount of memory to backup.
Now I have checked %APPDATA%\Garmin\BaseCamp\GeotaggedPhotos and found all the pictures there.
After deleted, my new backup is only 815kB.

Hello Falagar,

I've been working with the 'large' database since my previous post (a month ago).
But now my backup file has grown very large. And I mean really, really huge, this time. Its size is now 1,7 Gb (yes, 1,7 Gigabyte). The number of tracks and routes hasn´t changed significantly during the past month. What I have been doing, however, is geotagging about 900 photos from my holiday. But after that, I have deleted the pictures from Basecamp. Somehow, I guess, the database space used for storing the photos is not released when the photos are deleted.

For the time being, this is not yet a problem for me but I think it is an issue that needs to be adressed in a future release-patch of BC. Just my 2 cents .