Arc Reliability Issues

Arc App Support
1

Since upgrading to a new iPhone (and restoring it from the previous phone with a USB-C cable), I’ve found Arc’s reliability to be very poor. About 3 days after the phone replacement (which was Sept 19), I notice Arc was getting killed multiple times per day by iOS, and as a result missing a week’s worth of track recording. Worse - if I tried to access some of the recent days where tracks weren’t recorded, the app would freeze, and require a force-quit to get running again. I discovered and installed the separate Arc recorder app, but that didn’t make any difference in my ability to capture/see proper track recordings in Arc.

Eventually in frustration, I deleted and then redownloaded the App. It detected that a data backup was available, and I let it restore it, but it never seemed to properly finish (again, it would frequently get killed, or it would freeze if I tried to use it during the restore), or stop of the phone went to sleep. I tried the restore again overnight, and left it connected to power, with the screen lock turned off so Arc could run fully in the foreground. It took more than 10 hours to complete, and this morning, it reported that the restore had finished, but within a few minutes of exploring the restored history, the app froze and required a force-quit - and that’s happened multiple times this morning as I browse the recorded history.

I’ve been looking at some of the GPX tracks that it’s exported to iCloud, and now I’m worried that it’s either been recording things incorrectly, or is progressively corrupting things. Case in point: I traveled to Europe in 2018 in roughly all of September and October. But when I look at a single day’s .gpx file in that window, (say 14 Sep), I see tracks points from Sep 3 to November 6. And it’s not just that file - all the .gpx files in that period are similarly showing events for a wide range of dates. (Fortunately this isn’t happening with more recent tracks - 2022 and 2023 tracks appear to contain just events for single days).

In the GPX exports, there’s a batch of missing .gpx files from September 24 to October 1 inclusive (that’s the window where it became obvious something was wrong) but the export for the Sep 23rd shows events from Sep 23 to Oct 2, and the export for October 2 shows events from September 27 to October 2.

Is there a limit to how much data Arc can record? Is it getting ”revisionist” with my track history? Should I have been archiving old tracks somewhere so Arc doesn’t have to deal with too much data from the past?

I’m very disappointed about this - I’ve been using Arc for years, and happily so. But at this point, with this many problems, I’m not sure that renewing the annual subscription would be justifiable. Should I be deleting all data and backups (how?) and give it another fresh start? Separately, is there anything I can do to clean up the apparently corrupted GPX files so they only show events for the day they claim to be from, without losing the remaining events?

Sorry if this got a bit long, but there’s multiple issues here, with Arc seemingly at the core of them.

2

Hi @adg! Sounds like there’s a lot going on there. I’ll try to piece it apart and deal with some specific details, then hopefully that’ll shake out a path forward through what sounds like a growing mess.

First to answer a few simple questions:

No limit - it doesn’t care how big your database is, and longer history doesn’t cause problems. Many users have 10+ years of timeline data. My own is I think around 9 years of data.

So also, no need to be archiving anything. The only important thing to do is to make sure you’ve got Arc’s optional iCloud Drive backups on, because you can’t rely on iOS’s own backups for Arc. (iOS backups don’t tend to cope well with the size of Arc’s databases when it comes to restoring onto new phones).

Ok next up I think I should address the reliability problems you saw after migrating to a new iPhone. Those unfortunately are almost always not something that Arc has a choice in or part in. iOS reserves the right to terminate apps at any time, for any reason, and also without necessarily telling us what the reason was.

It has various systems that build up sort of “score cards” for each app, deciding whether iOS is liking that app’s behaviour or not, in terms of energy use, resource use, etc. If it starts scoring an app badly, as it appears it did for Arc on your new phone, it’ll be liable to terminate it more often in the background, and … problems ensue, as you experienced!

The flow on effect there is that the recorded timeline data becomes more fragmented and messy, and Arc’s timeline processing has a more difficult job to deal with. It can then get into problems it can’t automatically resolve, and in the worst case scenarios those problems can potentially compound, with the timeline processing unable to make adequate sense of things, while new data is still flowing in. It sounds like Arc on your new phone fell into one of those traps.

If you previously had Arc’s iCloud Drive backups feature enabled, and you have the most recent complete “Previous Backups” folder from your old phone, then restoring from that will be the cleanest path forward.

That would involve doing a fresh install of Arc, then restoring from that backup (which as you experienced, can take some time! It’s a massive amount of data), then going through the restored data and making sure it’s all as tidy as possible so that there’s no remaining messes that might cause compounding problems while newly recorded data is flowing in.

For that restore process, I would recommend using the manual File Importer view from the Settings tab, rather than the automatic “managed restore” that Arc offers on fresh installs, if it finds a Previous Backups folder on iCloud Drive.

Doing it from the File Importer allows you to do it week file by week file, that you can then inspect in timeline views to make sure everything came in cleanly, and deal with any potential messes before importing the next week.

To do that manual process, you need to copy that Previous Backups folder into the Import folder, then the File Importer view will find it and offer the files up for import. You only need to import the Sample week files - the TimelineItem files and Place files will be automatically imported as dependents of those Sample files. Though you can also import the Notes files at any point - those are simple and quick and not technically part of the timeline data.

Anyway, if you’re wanting to give that a try, let me know any questions you have along the way. I’m happy to assist!

3

Oh it just occurred to me another reason why Arc might have been getting terminated frequently on your new phone: New iOS installs (eg on a new phone) often have a lot of initial indexing, database creation, file syncing, etc, that are part of iOS itself. Like the Photos app might be syncing a whole lot of stuff from iCloud Photo Library, or the Messages app syncing. All sorts.

Those “first week on fresh iOS” tasks add up to quite a workload for a new phone or fresh iOS install sometimes. Which means there’s fewer spare resources in terms of CPU or battery to go around. So iOS during that period would also be more likely to terminate other background apps, because it needs the memory or CPU resources or it’s trying to manage battery use, that sort of thing.

4

Oh, one more thing comes to mind, that’s not useful yet but will be later once you’ve got all your data back in a sensible state in the database.

There’s the new Arc Timeline Editor app, which is a ground up rewrite of Arc Timeline. It’s significantly more reliable and problem free, because it doesn’t have the near-decade of technological baggage that old Arc Timeline app has.

You can import your Arc Timeline data into the new app relatively quickly, and then have a more reliable timeline recording and processing experience. But to get to that point yeah you’d ideally first want to get your data into a sensible state in the old app, before importing into the new. Though I guess technically you could import it across now, then do cleanup work in Arc Editor, given it’s faster and easier to work with. But… my inclination would still be to get things right in the old app first, before installing and migrating to the new.

Anyway you can learn more about Arc Editor in the various public beta discussion threads on the forum here, if you’re curious.