Data loss

[MelH-87]

Dear Community,

in the morning of the 23 June, all my previous data of the month were available. After tracking a walk with another app, all my previous data from 11th to 22nd June disappeared. I use a Fitbit Charge 5 and changed to the Google account some months ago which couldn’t be the reason for the data loss because everything has worked since that and it never happened before.

Does anybody have an idea?

Thank you very much on advance.
Melanie

[Julia_G]

Hi, @MelH-87 , if you link your Fitbit to an external app that also tracks activity, it can act as a manual log.  Activities logged manually will overwrite (suppress) what your Fitbit tracked during the same time period, so it is possible that this is what happened to your data.  If you delete the data from the external app I think you will find that your data is restored.

[MelH-87]

Dear Julia,

thank you for your help. I just recorded a walk with the app Strava and
wanted to check my steps in Fitbit. The walk couldn't be posted on Strava
and all my steps from the past 11 days disappeared from Fitbit.

[MelH-87]

Dear Julia_G,

thank you for your help! That’s interesting…and I’ll explain my situation in more detail.

1. I used my Fitbit the normal way - no other app - until 22nd June.
2. On 23rd in the morning, all my data were available.
3. After that, I wanted to track a walk with Strava app and after finishing the walk, I couldn’t post the walk on Strava which was surprising because it normally works.
4. Then, I checked my walk at Fitbit. Those data were available but all the data from 11th – 22nd June disappeared.
5. From this moment, all my data were tracked normally again. Only the data from the 12 days before are still gone.

Do you have any idea?

[Julia_G]

Hi, @MelH-87 , I am not at all certain that what I am suggesting is definitely what happened, but basically, as I said, if you link an external app to your Fitbit app it can act as a separate device.  So basically you have two “trackers” writing data to your Fitbit app.  When it works well, the app reconciles the data, but glitches are possible, in which one “device” overwrites the data of the other device (in this case your Fitbit).  So I am suggesting that it is possible that when you linked your walk from Strava it recorded that walk, but also overwrote the previous days (the external app having recorded nothing on those days).  I hope this makes sense!  To test this you could try deleting the (correct) data that Strava recorded (you can always add it back in manually) and unlink your Strava account (again, you can always re-link it) and see if your data from 11-22 June reappears.  

This is definitely NOT how it is supposed to work, but, as I said, when you effectively have two “devices” writing to the same account, sometimes glitches like this do occur.  

Unfortunately, if deleting any data from Strava does not restore the missing days I don’t know of any other way to restore it.

[MelH-87]

Dear @Julia_G,

thank you for trying to help me again. I’m just wondering because all the data were fully available until I tried to post the Strava walk which also didn’t work. I will check your suggestions and hope it will work somehow.