All waypoints gone ... deleted by accident - please help

[Christian Krummel]

Hi Michael,

I am pretty disappointed to say the least ... After I created a new route, I checked in 'Routes' that it is actually there and the path/route is the one I wanted to go. While checking, I found a whole bunch of other old routes which I must have created before. I thought of cleaning up this list and selected all items bar the one I just created. Also, I saw one item called 'Waypoints' displayed in between the old unwanted routes. Because I didn't see a reason why 'Waypoints' should be listed there, I selected it and deleted it with all the unwanted routes.

With upset I realised that all my waypoints are completely gone ... hours of work vanished in seconds. I closed the app immediately hoping that you can help restore my WPs. It took hours to manually create them initially.

Regards,

Christian

[Michael Schollmeyer]

Sorry to hear that. There is a trash for nodes in a stream, but the entire stream will get erased immediately when you choose to delete.

The reason your Waypoints stream shows in routes is most probably that you created a route inside this stream. I recommend you make copies of the database (gpse.db in com.mictale.gpsessentials/databases) frequently to backup your data.

Cheers, Michael
mictale.com/ms
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[Christian Krummel]

Hi Michael,

From a user's point of view, this does not make sense at all. Please consider that it is totally counter-intuitive to be in 'Routes' and still be able to delete your entire set of way points ever created. It makes people rage who spent hours creating way points manually. I am sure I am not alone being a firm believer of way points in any GPS devise is the most important and valued data, followed by tracks.

I am still upset all my way points are gone. It means I have to invest hours to recreate them and for many of them, I will have lost them forever as they were captured while walking a certain area. That's a great loss for me and I think the least you should consider is to develop the following:

1. A prompt when attempting to delete all of your way points
2. The option to enable auto-backup of the GPSE database. This could be placed in 'Settings' with the option for the user to set an interval for the auto-backup to run and also to chose the backup destination.

These are only two ways of preventing users to lose their entire and most critical set of GPS data.

Thoughts?

Regards,

Christian

[Michael Schollmeyer]

> From a user's point of view, this does not make sense at all. Please consider that it is totally counter-intuitive to be in 'Routes' and still be able to delete your entire set of way points ever created. It makes people rage who spent hours creating way points manually. I am sure I am not alone being a firm believer of way points in any GPS devise is the most important and valued data, followed by tracks.

Your list of waypoints is yet another stream. The only difference is that when you tap on the map from the start screen this will be your context stream and it will also spring to live at this time. The sole reason for this behaviour is backward compatibility, it will go away in future versions.

The reason why it showed up as a route on your device is (most probably) that you modified it so that is looked like a route to GPS Essentials. You can do this by either editing the root categorie's style and change it to "route" or by adding a route as a child category. In both cases GPS Essentials assumes this _is_ a route and shows the stream when you select the "All Routes" filter.

I could probably make the style of the Waypoints stream read only to prevent this, but then users who want to add categories to it would start complaining.

>
> I am still upset all my way points are gone. It means I have to invest hours to recreate them and for many of them, I will have lost them forever as they were captured while walking a certain area. That's a great loss for me and I think the least you should consider is to develop the following:
> • A prompt when attempting to delete all of your way points

There is a confirmation message when you delete streams. It's the same for all streams, though, but this is by design: The Waypoints stream is nothing special.

> • The option to enable auto-backup of the GPSE database. This could be placed in 'Settings' with the option for the user to set an interval for the auto-backup to run and also to chose the backup destination.

The database could be hundreds of MB in size. It's not easy to find a solution that scales, but I'm working on it.

> These are only two ways of preventing users to lose their entire and most critical set of GPS data.

I totally understand you're not amused and I'm very sorry that you lost your data. I am working on a trash on the stream level but there are some issues that need to be solved upfront.

Cheers, Michael
mictale.com/ms
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[Christian Krummel]

Michael,

Thank you for your response.

Can you please confirm what is the best way for users to backup their data. Reason for asking is that when you backup the entire database as suggested in one of your previous comments, I may have the entire DB but in my case after deleting all my waypoints accidentally, all I wanted was to restore my waypoints instead of replacing the entire DB with a version that may be a few weeks old. Would it not be easier to import a file with all waypoints? Of course, I would need to regularly export and store it e.g. on my external SD card which is backed-up regularly anyway.

Please advise.

Regards,

Christian

[Michael Schollmeyer]

There are some options and maybe a mix does what you want to achieve.

If you copy the entire database, you can only restore the entire database later. If you want to restore a portion of a previous version, you would have to rename the current database, restore a previous one, copy the data (e.g. share it on mapfinity.com), restore the renamed database from step #1 and then resynch with mapfinity. So, restoring is a mess but you would have a complete backup at any time.

You could also archive data somewhere, e.g. on mapfinity.com as mentioned above or export it into KML or GPX files. The export solution is not fully reversible, you will lose some of the data. E.g. both KML and GPX cannot store pictures.

Cheers, Michael
mictale.com/ms
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[Christian Krummel]

Ok, thanks. That's helpful.

Christian