If you’re anything like me, you’ve probably got several years and several thousand kilometres of history on your Strava account. You take it for granted that it’ll be there, available at any time for you to browse past rides, check on personal bests or compare yearly totals. But have you ever thought about what would happen if that data suddenly disappeared?

Years and years of ride data, make sure you have a back up!

If we’ve learned anything from last year’s Garmin hack, it’s that big corporations will illegally pay ransoms, oh wait not that, we’ve learnt that your data is not as safe as you think! In a worse case scenario if this happened to Strava, it’s possible ALL your data would be locked and there’s every chance you’d never get access to it again! Luckily for everyone, Strava make it easy to download a copy of all your data in one go. 

https://www.strava.com/settings/profile

You’ll need to use the desktop website to do this, so firstly log on there and navigate to your settings page, then click on “My Account” in the left hand menu. Scroll down until you see…

It’s weird that Strava bundle delete and download together! But anyway, click on “Get Started” underneath to start the process. On the next page, ignore box number 1 and 3, these are to delete your account! Go straight to box number 2, which is the download request. Click on “Request your Archive” to complete the request. You’ll get an email within the next 24 hours with a link to download your complete Strava history.

I try and do this at the end of each year, then store this on my back-up hard drive. Sure, most of my rides are also backed up through Garmin Connect, but not every single ride and Garmin Connect doesn’t include any photos, created routes or other Strava-specific data. The beauty of the Strava back-up is that it included ALL this extra data (yes, even those “Insta Banga” photos you added to each ride). Overkill? Perhaps, but it’s your data. It’s worth having some control over it, rather than just relying on a cloud-based service to keep it safe. 

Now is also a perfect time to double check and update your Strava privacy policy and if you haven’t already (you really should have) add some privacy zones to your account! Hope you all have a safe and productive start to 2021.