GO 910 - Updated maps - Lost Favourites, Home

[GVHTodi]

I'm hoping that I can do a 'Restore from Backup' or select those parts of the backup that contain my Favourites! I live in Italy and it took me over 4 hours today to download and install the latest map of Western Europe ((V.875.3615).

I now discover that Home, Favourite, Recent Destination, i.e. everything that I've previously saved on my TomTom is greyed out.

I searched the TomTom help site and it says how to Transfer Favourites to a new map, however, it doesn't say that this has to be done BEFORE you download a new map!

Also, when I connect my GO 910 to TomTom HOME (version 2.8.2.1171) it won't allow me to select the Device tab - only the Computer tab.

My OS is Mac OS X 10.6.8. Are there known problems?

I would be grateful for any help!

 

[dhn]

Do you have a backup of the 870 map? If so, use Finder and copy the mapsettings.cfg file from it to the new specific 875 map on your unit. Should restore all that stuff....

 

[Andy_P]

And *if* that causes the TT to go into an endless re-booting cycle, don't worry! There's an easy fix for that, which we'll tell you if it needs it.

 

[GVHTodi]

Do you have a backup of the 870 map? If so, use Finder and copy the mapsettings.cfg file from it to the new specific 875 map on your unit. Should restore all that stuff....

My previous map was quite a bit older than 870 - it was (I believe) 616 something. Anyhow, I located the mapsettings.cfg file on my laptop backup (last November - but better than no backup). I copied it to a flash drive and then to the desktop of my main iMac (to which the TomTom is connected).

When I first checked out the mapsettings.cfg file I'm sure that the description was 'Document' and the size was 20KB - now it seems to be saying that it's a Unix executable file

I can locate where to copy this file to on my computer but can't 'see' the file structure of the GO 910 on my computer - obviously I'm missing a step.

Would be grateful if you could point me in the right direction!

 

[GVHTodi]

Favourites restored

Thank you all for your help!

For anyone else who has this problem and is a Mac user - here's what I did to get my Favourites back ....


Copied the file 'Mapsettings.cfg' from my TomTom Backup location to the Desktop (even though it was almost a year old it was better than nothing) -
Connected my GO 910 to my Computer.
Quit TomTom HOME
Clicked on the TomTom disk in Finder sidebar
Scrolled down to Western Europe (I use column view)
Scrolled down to Mapsettings.cfg in the following column
Dragged the 'Mapsettings.cfg' file from the Desktop to the 'Western Europe' file of the TomTom disk
When told that there was a more recent file Mapsettings.cfg and asked if I wanted to replace it with the older file, selected Replace
Waited for the file to change (almost instantaneous)
Ejected TomTom disk in Finder sidebar
Turned off TomTom GO 910 - WOULD NOT TURN OFF BECAUSE IT WAS FROZEN ...
Hard re-set GO 910 using the straightened end of a paper clip
Re-started GO 910 - performed second hard re-set because it was still frozen
Re-started

E VOIL? - as our French friends say .... it started and I have all my Favourites back on my GO 910 ....

As George Bernard Shaw once said -

"Life wasn't meant to be easy, my child" .... I don't know whether ny TomTom experience allows me to finish the quote ... but take courage: it can be delightful!"

Hope someone finds this post of some use - I've wasted the best part of a day trying to simply update a map - not realising what a can or worms I would open ....

Cheers

 

[Andy_P]

Well done.... That's pretty much what we would have told you to do, if you hadn't worked it out for yourself quicker.

Just for info, more recent TomToms have software that *does* (usually) transfer the MapSettings.cfg file across to a new map successfully for you, but it can still go wrong sometimes.

One thing we often suggest is that you save your important personal destinations as a POI category rather than (or as well as) Favourites.

You an make a new POI category on the TomTom itself ("Manage POIs" in the Preferences menu), then one by one go to each Favourite on the Browse map screen and re-save them into that POI category.

(You could also achieve the same result quicker by using a program such as POIEdit to open the MapSettings.cfg file and save what you want as a POI file)

The POI file you create will be much more portable and safer then the Favourites were.

Another tip is to call the new POI category some thing like "_My Favourites", as the underscore character at the front puts it right at the top of the alphabetical list on screen.


Oh, and don't forget to make a new full backup NOW before you forget. Use Finder, not TT 'Home' to do that.

 

[PJL500]

Paid for map update. Lost Favs, settings. Thanks!!!

Same here. And I was not prompted to do a backup before updating - lost 2 months of favorites IFF I can retrieve the favs from this .cfg file. So I used the Restore button but the restore is taking as long as the update (forever) so I think it is restoring the old map as well. Crap software - what a waste of time.