HELP! Lost PowerAgent 7 data!

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I would appreciate some help if anyone could provide any (Saris CS was of none). We recently upgraded our computer, and didn't realize that this crappy PowerAgebnt 7 software does not back up your data in any way. Apparently after downloading your data to the application, Saris feels that everyone should just know that you need to export the data as a .csv file in order to back it up for later use should you have some sort of computer glitch. I had just assumed that data files would be stored somewhere, and could access them later from a backup. It would appear as if this crappy software somehow stores the data within the application file itself, and thus the 'backup' copy is 34MB, whereas the newly-installed version is ~17MB. It would appear that the data is in there, but cannot be accessed.

I'm running Mac OS X v10.4.11, by the way (which is the primary reason I've not yet started using Training Peaks; I know, I know...).

Does anyone know if this data is retrievable? Saris CS said it wasn't if it didn't show up when the app was opened, which it did not. I'm dumbfounded that a piece of software can require the user to manually back up data files; it really makes no sense to me, and I can't recall reading about that in the User Manual, though admittedly that was a year ago.

Thanks for any help!

Jeff

I tried asking on this forum about this same problem and got no replies. I now use Cycling Peaks on my Mac via Parallels. Works a treat. Try downloading them both if you have an Intel Mac and use the demos to see how good it is.

I now drag and drop the Cycling Peaks folder onto my Mac desktop to back it up. Windows has crashed and burned a couple of times and it saved all my data.

Here's how I recovered my Power Agent 7.1 data following a hard drive crash. I am running Mac OS X 10.4.11

I had the hard drive backed up but I was worried about those Power Agent files since I had never really read or implemented the specifics on how to back these up. I was hoping that all the ride data would backup when I did my periodic hard drive backup procedure about every month.

I got into trouble when I was reformatting the hard drive after I had problems with it. I decided I wanted to completely erase the hard drive and reinstall fresh copies of all of the applications. So I deleted the Power Agent 7.1 application from my list of backup thinking I was just deleting the app and would save space and reinstall a new copy later.

Was that ever a mistake.

After reinstalling a fresh copy of Power Agent 7.1 on the reformatted hard drive, I started looking through the files on my backup for my ride files. I couldn't find them.

That's when I went to Cycling Forums trying to find out WHERE in the Mac directory PowerAgent stores those ride data files. I found in this thread the disappointing news that the ride files were bundled with the Power Agent Application that I had deleted. Sigh..........

Here's how I got out of the problem. I can't believe it works and I have my data back with Power Agent displaying a years worth of ride files that I thought only resided in biological memory. Note, this will only work if you have your USERS folder backed up. There are some hidden files in there that you can put with a reinstalled Power Agent App and get the newly installed Power Agent App viewing ride data that you didn't specifically backup with the old copy of Power Agent that was in use when hard drive problems set in.

Get TinkerTool (http://www.bresink.com/osx/0TinkerTool/download.html)

TinkerTool is "freeware" that lets you view hidden files in your Mac directory.

Reinstall a fresh copy of Power Agent

Launch Power Agent but don't create a new user.

Close Power Agent

Go to your backup copy of your USERS Folder with TinkerTool "on" so you can see hidden files in the finder window.

On the Backup copy of your drive in Users--->Your User Folder there is a hidden folder named ".poweragent"

Copy this into Users--->Your User Folder on the reformatted drive after deleting the copy that launching Power Agent for the first time created. So you are replacing the new .poweragent file with your old one that has ride data on it.



Then, go into the folder Users--->Your User Folder--> Library-->Application Support in the backup and find the "poweragent" folder. This isn't a hidden folder. Copy this "poweragent" folder into the Users--->Your User Folder--> Library-->Application Support folder on the reformatted hard drive.

Relaunch Power Agent.

There's your data, hopefully. I played around with this for about 45 minutes and these are general steps that I took before I finally got my data back.

I immediately backed everything up. Twice.