GPS devices are great tools for telling people where they are and for guiding them where they want to go. Sometimes they are overlooked for their ability to show people where they have been. Garmin’s entire outdoor handheld line records this information in the active tracklog, up to 10,000 previous locations (typically enough to record a multi-day hike). To support even longer activities, Garmin Colorado, Oregon, and Dakota devices use automatic track archiving. When your tracklog is nearly full, the oldest activities are automatically archived in a GPX file, making room for new points to be recorded. The archived activities can be retrieved from the \Garmin\GPX\Archive\ folder in mass storage mode. Tracks added to the archive folder exist in addition to the 200 saved tracks allowed on the device.
In the latest firmware, Dakota, Oregon 450, and Oregon 550 devices add more utility to track archiving. Beyond adding the ability to change the current track color, users of our Stopwatch application will be interested to note that activities completed while the stopwatch is running will be automatically archived as well.
