Arc Data recovery

Arc App Support
1

Hi Matt, I hope you’re able to help me recover my Arc data. My phone recently went into a boot loop that forced me to restore the phone to factory settings. In trying to restore from my iCloud backups, every restore causes the same boot loop. Apparently all my backups are corrupt (?). In Arc I had turned on daily and monthly exports, as well as the Arc backup, although checking a week or so ago, I noticed that the Arc backup said it hadn’t backed up for five+ months and was still working on it.

Before I reinstall Arc and potentially overwrite any existing Arc backup, is there any way to recover my data? Thanks

2

Hi @jmc! Sure, let’s dig in and get this sorted.

That’s not necessarily as worrying as it sounds. When doing the daily backups Arc will might get 99% of the way through the new data each time, but then iOS might stop the background task shortly before the job is fully finished. Which means that inside Arc it’ll say it hasn’t finished the backup recently, but in reality it’s probably still 99% there. And that’s good enough for restoring from backup.

The thing to check for is the sample week files. If you have a look in the iCloud Drive / Arc App folder, you should see either “Backups” or “Previous Backups”. Probably in this case it’ll still be called Backups, because it only gets renamed to Previous Backups when Arc gets reinstalled.

Have a look in that Backups folder, then in LocomotionSamples folder, then look to see if all the week files are there for each year you should have data. Basically those files are the core of the backups, and everything else can be reconstructed so long as that samples data is available.

If those sample files look to be all there, great! We can move on to the next step. If not … unfortunately we might be in a bad situation. It agree with your read that it looks like your iOS backup is corrupted in some way, causing that boot loop. So… I’m thinking there’s probably no way we can rescue Arc’s data from within there. (Well, no way that I’m aware of. But people more familiar with iOS backups might have better ideas. Though I’m guessing that because they’re stored on iCloud, they’re not really accessible to us to go poking through).

Anyway, let’s assume those sample files in Arc’s own iCloud Drive backups are looking good. If that’s the case, then you a reinstall Arc and it’ll offer a pink banner up the top of the screen, to do a managed restore from backup.

You can opt to do that managed restore, and it should work out fine. But if you’ve got many years of data sometimes that managed restore doesn’t go great. It’s basically a lot of data, so … the process gets challenging at some points, and the automatic/managed restore might struggle.

So … well, there’s no harm in trying the managed restore first. Tapping through that pink banner and letting Arc try to do the restore all on its own. If at the end of all that the timelines come out looking broken, we can move on to the manual process.

Oh before trying that though, you should go into the Files app on your phone and find that Backups folder or Previous Backups folder, and long press on it then choose “Keep Downloaded” or “Download Now” (I’m leaning towards the former, because even if you ask for it to be downloaded, iOS might soon after decide it wants to purge it to save space, which will mess up our plans).

Getting Files app to force that download first will make the process go smoother/faster in Arc.

Anyway that’s enough steps for now. Let me know how you get on with those, then we can look at next steps if necessary.

3

Hi Matt, I thank you for helping me out with this. I checked my Arc app folder on iCloud Drive. I have three ‘Previous Backups’ folders each with a different eight digit alpha numeric sequence as part of their title. Between all three previous backup folders I have 3,025 LocomotionSample files. Two of those three previous backup folders each contain folders called TimelineRangeSummary, TimelineItem, LocomotionSample, Note, and Place. One of the previous backup folders does NOT contain the Note folder.

In the main Arc App folder, in addition to the ‘Previous Backups’, is an Export folder containing a GPX and a JSON folder, an Import folder (currently empty), and a moves_export folder with my previous Moves data. Those are the ONLY other folders in the Arc App folder.

Before I reinstall Arc Timeline, Arc Mini, and Arc Timeline Recorder again, should I combine copies all of the files from all three LocomotionSample folders and put them in the Import folder as files or put them in a folder called LocomotionSample? Or should I just copy all three Previous Backups folders with all their subfolders and put them in the Import folder? Or not do any of that?

Finally, other than turning ON the daily and weekly exports, should I turn OFF the Arc backup until this gets resolved?

Thanks again, Jeff

4

Ok that sounds promising!

Yeah, multiple Previous Backups folders is common. If you ever turn off then back on Arc’s backups setting it’ll rename the previous Backups folder to Previous Backups, same as it would during a fresh install of the app.

What I think I’d do at this point if figure out which Previous Backups is the newest one. Then hopefully that one has all the sample week files in it, in their most recent forms.

Though if it’s not that clear cut, like the most recent one doesn’t contain everything, then it might be time to get creative with possibly doing multiple restores, starting from the oldest folder then working forward in time. But in the hope that the newest folder is complete (or complete enough), I’ll move on to describing the import process.

So … I think in this case I’d actually jump straight to doing a manual import/restore. If there was only one Backups folder or one Previous Backups folder I might lean towards the auto/managed restore. But yeah, in this case, the manual. So to do that:

  1. Copy the chosen Previous Backups folder into the Import folder
  2. Reinstall Arc, go to the Settings tab, Import, Export & Backup menu, “Open File Importer”
  3. You’ll see the various import files sections fill in with all those files
  4. Start by tapping on the most recent sample week file to import it. This will also import any necessary TimelineItem and Place files that those samples depend on.
  5. Go check in the timeline view that that data has come in cleanly. If not, do any necessary cleanup at this point, to get that data looking sane.
  6. Repeat this process for each week file, working backwards in time. Though if things are going smoothly, you could tap a few week files at a time, though always working backwards in time, so that there’s never gaps in the timeline that the processing engine might mistakenly attempt to heal over.

Oh, one detail that’ll be useful to keep in mind: Some useful things need to be automatically rebuilt after the data is imported, and this might not happen immediately. The most relevant one being the “activity type models”, which are the things that the activity type classifiers use to automatically determine the activity types of samples that haven’t been explicitly confirmed as one type or another (eg walking, running, etc).

That means that earlier on in the import process the timeline processing (or rather activity type classification) might act quite dumb. It won’t be able to sensibly determine activity types. But that should be quite brief (or at least ideally so, if iOS is playing ball). As soon as that data is imported Arc will ask iOS to run a scheduled task to start updating those data models. And if iOS is being kind it will run that task almost immediately.

Anyway, yeah, after first week or two of import if you notice the timeline data acting a bit weird, with really odd or nonsense activity type assignments on some items, that’s why. No need to panic! You can fix those assignments by going into the edit views, and once the data models have ben updated Arc’s own auto assignments will settle down, back into sane choices.

Oh you can also at any point in the process import the Notes files. Those are harmless to do at any stage, and should all import in a second or two. You can also import the TimelineRangeSummary files at any point, though those are almost entirely useless. They exist essentially only to preserve knowledge of which days you’ve marked as favourites. If you don’t us the favourite button on days ever, then those files contain nothing of interest.

So yeah, the sample week files are the core of it all. The Notes files are, well, your notes you’ve added, and the TimelineRangeSummary files contain info on which days you’ve marked as favourite. The other files you can ignore - importing them won’t do anything useful, and they’ll be auto imported anyway, as needed.

Ok so if looking at the Previous Backups folders you get the sense the most recent one isn’t as complete as hoped in terms of sample week files, then let me know and we can start thinking about a possible multiple restores flow, or even merging folders as you suggested. Though if it comes to that we’ll want to make careful decisions. So yeah, I won’t dive into those details yet, in the hope that they won’t be necessary!