"Hard reset" question... trying to get rid of a pesky song

Yes you will lose your activity history and personal records...on the watch. They will be preserved on Garmin Connect. You can sync your records back (by pressing a button on the GC website), but you can't sync your history back without manually backing up and restoring certain parts of the watch file system.

Assuming that your watch is similar to the 935, there are other things you can manually back up and restore, like 3rd party apps (and settings), but there are a few things which can't be manually restored (or restored at all), like FirstBeat metrics (assuming TrueUp is not available yet), fitness tracking data (e.g. weekly steps), totals (despite what the Garmin support page says), and certain settings.

See this post for the procedure for backing up and restoring watch config/data for Fenix 5/935. Hopefully it'll also work for 645.
https://forums.garmin.com/forum/into...00#post1282900

The procedure for restoring history has worked for me on other generations/models of Garmin watches, so I'm fairly confident about that. (Although you could experiment with one activity if you want to be sure.)

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As an aside, note that many people use the phrase "hard reset" to simply mean "forcefully turn the device off and on again" (by holding down Light for 20 seconds until it turns off, then turning it on again). (IOW, it's like forcing your laptop or your phone to turn off completely when it's not responding.)

So, if someone ever suggests that you do a "hard reset", make sure you double-check what they really mean. Quite often, the meaning is actually "force restart" and not "wipe all data"/"factory reset".

kind of related to this, how about copying the problem song to the watch again? As in, can re-writing the file make it playable and/or deletable again?

On most devices a 'hard reset' is press and hold power on/off for ~15s until it powers off; no personal data lost usually, maybe just some current step info. Try that before a full factory reset.

Thank you all for the detailed info. And robm, that's a great idea to try to re-write the file! I'll give it a shot.

Tl;dr: How painful is a hard reset? If I do it, will all my history and personal records disappear, even from Garmin Connect?

The story:
I’ve previously reported that my music will sometimes stop playing at the end of a song. After further digging I’ve found it’s actually stalling when it tries to move on to one certain song. But… I can’t seem to delete that song. Even after deleting all songs (and seeing no songs listed when connected to Garmin Express), that one song still appears when I access “My Music” directly on the watch.

So… one of the reset options on the watch (perhaps what others call a “Hard reset”) is:

“To reset all of the device settings to the factory default values and delete all activity information and stored music, select Delete Data and Reset Settings.”

My question is… what pain will I be causing myself if I do this? Will it actually reset, for example, all my history and personal records, or are they preserved in Garmin Connect? What else will cause me to say “Oh crap, I shouldn’t have done that”?

Thanks!

I have to hard reset my watch regularly to solve this exact problem. I takes a few minutes to resync and update setting but does solve the problem. Do you use a Mac by any chance?

I have to hard reset my watch regularly to solve this exact problem. I takes a few minutes to resync and update setting but does solve the problem. Do you use a Mac by any chance?

Yes, I do use a Mac.

When I'm running and this issue happens, I can sometimes get the music back by powering off the headphones, waiting a while, and maybe fiddling with the watch's music controls by trying to choose another song. Not sure exactly what I do to get it back, to be honest.

Yes, I do use a Mac.

When I'm running and this issue happens, I can sometimes get the music back by powering off the headphones, waiting a while, and maybe fiddling with the watch's music controls by trying to choose another song. Not sure exactly what I do to get it back, to be honest.

I use a Mac as well, and based on posts I've seen on these forums, this issue seems isolated to Mac users, while Windows users report no problem. Hopefully, Garmin will come up with a fix for this.

In an effort to delete a "phantom song' from the watch, I've plugged it into a PC in order to get access to the file system. I've verified the song/album is deleted, but the song/album reference remains in the watch. I think the Mac syncing process is corrupting a database file, with the media files being deleted, but the reference to them remaining. Hope that make sense.

I have also powered my headphones (Trekz-Air) off/on during a run to try and re-enable audio. Though it sometimes works, it's very annoying to say the least.

Just a thought. Once deleted from the device, have you emptied the trash on the Mac? Experience suggests that on the Mac at least, you need to remove the file from the trash to properly delete it from the device.

This isn't just a Mac issue...I'm on Windows, and just this week my watch has stopped after a song on my last three runs. I investigated, and I found I couldn't remove Puffy Amiyumi's "Tokyo Nights" from the watch. It didn't show up on Garmin Express, didn't show up in the file system, only on the watch, and it wouldn't actually play when I tried to play it. I eventually had to hard reset. I'm on version 3.40, dunno why it's happening, but it's not just a Mac thing.

Thanks for posting your experience. Hopefully Garmin can address this soon as it's pervasive across both OSs.