Charge 4 lost an hour's worth of data

[fractalmuse]

I was getting ready to start a late night workout but my phone (Pixel 5) refused to sync with my Charge 4. I tried a couple of things (mostly just force-stopping the app, clearing cache and toggling Bluetooth on and off) but no dice. The wrist tracker was still counting my steps and all so because it was late I decided to just go ahead with my workout and sort out the sync later.

The workout itself was fine, I did a 25-minute HIIT which the Charge 4 tracked and appeared to save (including updating the little wheel that tracks how many days of exercise you've done). There was also the walk to/from the rec area including 4 flights of stairs.

I got back to my place shortly past midnight and went back to the syncing problem; I ended up restarting the tracker itself (from the device, since my phone still wasn't recognising it) which had a note saying no data would be lost. This fixed the issue and the app paired with it once more but when I refreshed the app to sync it, it didn't load anything I did while it was not syncing. My step count, calorie count, zone minutes, etc were still stuck where they were when I first started having issues. And the tracker had already rolled over to the next day so I couldn't check them anymore, and the exercise day count wheel had dropped the logged workout.

I don't know why the tracker would lie that no data would be lost when data very plainly can and would be lost. And now I'm completely off my goals for the week, I can manually log a workout but the metrics are still all off (no way to capture the 40-something zone minutes for example).

[Julia_G · Accepted solution]

Hi, @fractalmuse , it was not the restart that messed up your data - it was that your tracker was apparently stuck just around midnight.  It sounds like when you synced the Charge 4 correctly recognised that the time was after midnight so received the signal to zero all data before it had synced the previous data.  

I once had exactly this problem when doing a lot of late night walking once some years ago when a workout straddled midnight.  It is just one of those flukes, and not likely to recur.  It was just unlucky that you had a sync issue at exactly the wrong time.

You can be confident that re-starting your device does not cause data loss.

[fractalmuse]

Oh that makes an unfortunate amount of sense 😞 thank you for letting me know

[ManuFitbit]

Hi @fractalmuse. A warm welcome to the community forums.

I'm sorry to know the experience that you had with it and thank you for letting us know.

I'd recommend you take in consideration the tips listed in this article: How do Fitbit devices sync their data?

If in any case you are having difficulties to sync your tracker with the app, please take a look in this article: Why won't my Fitbit device sync?

Thanks @Julia_G for helping.