Extracting Tracks from the old Trails app on iOS 11

How To…
1

For technical reasons, the old app (available until mid 2014) cannot run on iOS 11. As each iOS app can only access its own data, we cannot read the old app’s data from within the new app.

There is one option to retrieve your old data which requires a bit of work:

Create a system backup using iTunes while the old app is still installed. The easiest way is to create an unencrypted backup for this purpose, although encrypted backups should work as well (but you’ll have to enter your password in a later step).

To export your data, please install one of these applications (or a similar one if you have any preference) on your computer:

https://macroplant.com/iexplorer
https://imazing.com

Both suggested applications offer free trial versions that should be sufficient for this step. Please note that we cannot take any responsibility for 3rd party software, but we have tried both applications and are not aware of any issues. Upon opening the respective application, you should find the system backup and within it, the old Trails app. Browse to its “Documents” directory, export and zip it.

If you send us this file via email (e.g., via Dropbox link or email attachment), we will convert it to a file format that the new app can open.

If you don’t want to send us the file, you can also convert it yourself by running these commands:

sqlite3 <filepath>
SELECT * FROM ZTRACK;
.exit
  • Zip the database plus the newly created files in this directory and add the tgt-legacy file extension. Ensure the original database file name within the zip is unchanged. The resulting file can be opened with the new Trails app.
2

Hello trails-support,

nice article, but can you please describe a litle bit more the export process?

i got the database file “trails-userdata.sqlite” from my iphone Backup, i downloaded sqllite https://www.sqlite.org/download.html and got the resultset with naming of the trails from your “select * from ztrack” statement. perfect, but how should i convert or export data?

thanks a lot for more informations about how to do that.

best regards
Andreas

3

After executing the SQL statement, you should find more than one file in the directory that before only included the .sqlite file, is that correct?

If so, select all files in that directory and compress them to one .zip file (any ZIP archiver should do, and your operating system probably has one built-in). The result should be one .zip file, so the last step is to change the .zip file extension to .tgt-legacy.

This .tgt-legacy file can then be imported by the Trails app (e.g., by opening it from the Dropbox or Files app on your phone).

We hope this is helpful?