I love Garmin Connect and my Garmin Instict, which has become a daily fellow in all of our little adventures and sport activities. I mean, how else can you brag about your sport achievements or where you have been in your last vacation? :-)

Since I consider this a service that really adds value to our life and loosing all of my recorded activities would be a tragic loss I went to the depths of the internet in the search for methods and tools on how to create a backup of all of your data.

Exporting your data with the garmin-connect-export tool

I tested this tool in Linux. While scrolling through the source I don’t see why this should not work on Mac or Windows as well, but I have not tested this

I stumbled across this little fella here: the pe-st/garmin-connect-export tool, written in Python. It’s super handy and allows to download all of your recorded activities at once. Usage is as simple as

./gcexport.py --username USERNAME -c all

The program then asks for your password and downloads all of your files in GPX format. If you want to use the original garmin format (zipped .fit files) use the -f original parameter.

Depending on the number of activities, this might take some minutes. On my Laptop it was downloading at a rate of ~1 activity per second.

I spend a quick look through the source code and it doesn’t look like something nasty is happening there. But please check for yourself before you trust random code from the internet :-)

Alternative Method: data download (thanks to the GDPR)

You can request an archive of all of your data here. I requested it like an hour ago - they say this can take up to a month. At the time of writing I didn’t got any response. Since the above mentioned garmin-connect-export tool does the job I don’t care about this anymore.

Link to my future self: Request the data here.

Update 27.08.2020: It arrived on 27.08, so 19 days after the request.