Mac BaseCamp 4.1.1 backup files are in zip format

Former Member over 12 years ago

I haven’t seen this tidbit anywhere here so I thought I’d share.

This morning when I launched BaseCamp it said its database was corrupt. Luckily I was able to do a restore from a two day old backup I had done using the BaseCamp’s File > Backup... command. I only lost a dozen waypoints I plotted yesterday.

Out of curiosity, I wanted see what was stored in the BaseCamp.backup file, you know, in case I ever wanted to do a partial restore of some data. Simply changing the extension of the .backup file to .zip allowed OS X Finder to decompress the backup file. The resulting folder had the exact same structure and content of the ~/Library/Application Support/Garmin/BaseCamp/ directory.

Unfortunately most of BaseCamp's data is stored in .gdb files. GPSBabel is supposed to be able to convert .gdb files, but it does not seem to be working with the files created by BaseCampe 4.1.1 ([FONT=Courier New]Unknown or/and unsupported GDB version (-198.0)![/FONT])

Oh well, at least I can easily recover any GPX data or geotagged photos from the BaseCamp.backup file.

0 SUSSAMB over 12 years ago

Maybe post this in the Mac section:)

0 Former Member over 12 years ago

This applies to PC BaseCamp as well. The backup file is the same. You could even back-up on a Mac and restore on a PC or vice-versa.

Yes, the backup file is just a zip file. It zips up the contents of %APPDATA%\Garmin\BaseCamp on the PC (which corresponds to ~/Library/Application Support/Garmin/BaseCamp/).

GPSBabel can only read older versions of GDB. The one BaseCamp writes out is not supposed to be an exchangeable format, it's where BaseCamp stores its data. However, you can export data as gdb from BaseCamp. GPSBabel should be able to read exported gdb files.