Now you see it, now you don't (PretzelFest stage completion vanished)

I completed stage 3 this afternoon at 16:00 UK time. Just as it was saving, a message popped up saying that the connection had been lost, the ride had been saved locally, and it would be uploaded next time a connection was available. Then Zwift locked up on my Android tablet.

I killed the app and restarted it, and reset my Internet connection. Sure enough, the ride uploaded and appeared, with “photos”, in my activity feed.

But then, the app said I had an unsaved ride, and asked whether to save it, so I said yes. Big mistake. It seems to have overwritten my stage completion with a “null” ride of the same distance. The photos show no riders, there’s no record of the stage completion, but it’s a ride of the same route, distance, climbing, etc. with no-one “ridden with” etc. In fact, there seem to be two versions of the ride like that, one with ten ride-ons and one with none.

Don’t suppose there’s any way to recover this?

Hi @David_Rossall

We’re sorry to hear that this happened. You mentioned trying to recover this data. Did it override the activity that you see on your dashboard in Zwift? Did the correct ride upload to your third party tracking sites?

I only ask as while we can’t do anything about the activity that you see in the Zwift app itself, you may be able to recover the correct ride fit file and upload that ride to those sites manually so that at least it’s reflected correctly there.

You can always reach out to us directly if you have any further questions.

Hi John

Thanks for the kind reply. No, everything is consistent with the idea that the correct file, for the PretzelFest event, uploaded first, but somehow was not flagged as correctly uploaded (to Zwift). Then the app crash lost those parts of the information that related to the event, but retained the basic ride time and route. So a second upload overwrote the first, but with less-complete data, and a second or third upload created the duplicate.

So, on Zwift, I first saw the stage in my activities list (with “photos” in the event kit and so on). Then, after restarting the app, I was invited to save/upload it again. At that point, the original version was replaced by two instances of the same ride with no link to the event (and photos with no-one in them), as now. So my activities list says I was doing two identical rides at the same time, except that only one of the two earned me Ride Ons.

Garmin Connect is also consistent with that, although it only has one version of the ride and not two in my activities list. But it’s not named for the PretzelFest, unlike the other stages I have done. Obviously I could just edit that! So it’s not worth uploading the .fit file because Connect already knows about the ride and doesn’t really care about it being in an event.

For what it’s worth, I’ve got three .fit files for the day - two small ones and the one that obviously contains the ride (but presumably not event) data.

I did the stage again yesterday and saved it correctly. However, there’s clearly a possibility of a correct upload getting overwritten with a damaged version in the way that I described.