Garmin Connect history now only goes back one year max

Garmin contacted me and were not happy about how Intervals.icu has been using their “backfill old data” API endpoint (too many calls, large date ranges). They explained that it puts a lot of stress on their systems and they prefer developers not to use it at all and only work with new activities. I explained why history is valuable on Intervals.icu and they agreed to allow calls to fetch history going back up to a year.

This applies to activities and wellness data. I have implemented this limitation in Intervals.icu. The “Fetch old data” and “Fetch activities since” options will now not go back further than one year.

Garmin have actually been pretty good about this. A lot of big tech companies would have just disabled API access and I would have spent weeks trying to get it restored. I received email from a real human to connect via teams and discuss the problem and it is now sorted out without any API interruption.

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If we already have all of your Garmin history on intervals will it stay?

So what gets synced today will it get removed in a year?

No everything on Intervals.icu will stay. Garmin don’t have those kind of unpleasant “we can instruct you to delete everything” terms in their API legals.

There are huge power players in this industry that haven’t convinced Garmin to allow historical syncing of Connect data. This might sound to some like an unfortunate compromise but this is intervals punching way above its weight.

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