Dienstag, 31. Dezember 2013

Sharing Garmin Activities/History directories between multiple computers

Finally a new post after a really long pause, my new found love for endurance sports not playing the least part here, so this will be the topic here.

Obviously, I'm using Garmin products for tracking my training, so I can train and play around with technology at the same time :-)  Garmin devices will usually store the training data in Activities/History directories in your Windows user directory, e.g. for XP in C:\Documents and Settings\{USERNAME}\Application Data\GARMIN\Devices\{DEVICE-NUMBER}\ and for Windows 7 in C:\Users\{USERNAME}\AppData\Roaming\GARMIN\Devices\{DEVICE-NUMBER}\.

Now if you synchronize your device with multiple computers, you'll only get new data on the computer you sync with after the activity. Why not use Dropbox to keep the computers in sync?

For Windows XP, create a symbolic link according to http://schinagl.priv.at/nt/hardlinkshellext/hardlinkshellext.html, for Windows 7 use mklink according to http://verysimple.com/2008/06/02/create-symbolic-links-in-windows-xp-and-vista/.

Then link Activities and History directories in your Windows user directory from above to some directory in your Dropbox folder. That's it.

Note: I work at Garmin, but this is in no way an official Garmin approach but simply what I found out as an interested Garmin user, so use at your own risk.