Favorites and home location gone after installing map update, help?

[camden]

I have the Go 920 and bought and installed map updates last night. Now today I've discovered that all my favorites are missing and my Home location is gone as well. What happened and how can I get them back? The list of favorites was fairly sizable so it would be a real pain if they were gone for good...unfortunately I didn't make a back up of them beforehand but im hoping maybe there's still some way to recover them.

Thanks in advance for any help!

 

[canderson]

I have the Go 920 and bought and installed map updates last night. Now today I've discovered that all my favorites are missing and my Home location is gone as well. What happened and how can I get them back? The list of favorites was fairly sizable so it would be a real pain if they were gone for good...unfortunately I didn't make a back up of them beforehand but im hoping maybe there's still some way to recover them.

Thanks in advance for any help!

If you have a fairly recent backup of your unit, you want to find the file mapsettings.cfg in the backup map folder for your TT, and copy that back to your unit.

Since your unit cannot move upward to 9.XXX firmware, and since everything from 8.XXX and before kills the mapsettings.cfg file with every map update, you will ALWAYS want to make a copy of that file before doing an update. In fact, we recommend an entire Windows or Finder or (name your O.S.) backup of your 920 before doing any major update.

 

[camden]

If you have a fairly recent backup of your unit, you want to find the file mapsettings.cfg in the backup map folder for your TT, and copy that back to your unit.

Since your unit cannot move upward to 9.XXX firmware, and since everything from 8.XXX and before kills the mapsettings.cfg file with every map update, you will ALWAYS want to make a copy of that file before doing an update. In fact, we recommend an entire Windows or Finder or (name your O.S.) backup of your 920 before doing any major update.

Sorry for the late reply
Like I said in my first post, I unfortunately didn't make a backup of the unit beforehand...I didn't realize buying a map update would erase all my saved data. So there's no way to recover all the data that was erased if a backup of it all hadn't been made before the update?

 

[dhn]

Unfortunately not.

All your favourites and other settings are kept in a file called mapsettings.cfg which resides in the specific map folder. An updated map installation overwrites a previous file in many cases.

It is for this reason that many do not use Favourites at all but, rather, create a custom poi file that can be retained or copied from map update to map update.

To see how, look here

 

[camden]

Unfortunately not.

All your favourites and other settings are kept in a file called mapsettings.cfg which resides in the specific map folder. An updated map installation overwrites a previous file in many cases.

It is for this reason that many do not use Favourites at all but, rather, create a custom poi file that can be retained or copied from map update to map update.

To see how, look here

Wouldn't the custom POIs be erased/overwritten on the next map update the same as the Favorites would, though?

Another thing I'm having trouble with; since my original post I added some new favorites (after the originals had disappeared), I backed those up, then after another update those were gone from the device as well. I found this out while driving the next day but had a few more favorites to add before I got back home so I now have several favorites on the current mapsettings.cfg file and several others on the "old" backed up mapsettings.cfg file from a week or so ago, all of which I'd like to keep. How can I merge the two without overwriting one set of favorites?

 

[canderson]

Wouldn't the custom POIs be erased/overwritten on the next map update the same as the Favorites would, though?

NO. Your custom POI files are safe. The mapsettings.cfg file is rewritten with the installation of new map updates. Your *.ov2 files are not. Your TomTom's firmware stores all kinds of things in the mapsettings.cfg file. It doesn't care what *.ov2 files you add since it doesn't touch them except when you ask it to.

Another thing I'm having trouble with; since my original post I added some new favorites (after the originals had disappeared), I backed those up, then after another update those were gone from the device as well. I found this out while driving the next day but had a few more favorites to add before I got back home so I now have several favorites on the current mapsettings.cfg file and several others on the "old" backed up mapsettings.cfg file from a week or so ago, all of which I'd like to keep. How can I merge the two without overwriting one set of favorites?

It can be a bit of a mess since all your recent destinations, etc. are stored there as well, but a program called POIEDIT can open a mapsettings.cfg file.

If you were to OPEN one mapsettings.cfg file, delete all of the stuff out you do not want, then SAVE it as an OV2 file called something.OV2, then OPEN your other mapsettings.cfg file and APPEND it to your something.OV2 file, you would wind up with a single POI file with all of your favorites in one place again.

POIEDIT can be found here: PoiEdit - Main

It's got some other useful features as well, so be sure to look it over.

 

[camden]

Thanks for the help, I've been able to rebuild most of my Favorites list as custom POIs. Small nit-picky thing though; I'd like to change the Custom POI symbol on the map back to the star symbol that's used for the Favorites.

I searched for how to do that and came across this thread where I read the following:

Further, there is a recent thread here somewhere where one member provided bmp's for downloading with the standard Star symbol of Favourites used by TomTom.

However, I haven't been able to find that thread with the bmp for download. If it's still around, could someone point me in the right direction? Thanks again!

 

[mikealder]

Have a look at the attached file it should be something like what you are after but make sure you rename the file to match whatever you have named the coresponding ov2 file as - Mike

 

[camden]

The .bmp in the last post didn't work with my TomTom for some reason so I made a stab at creating my own; it took me a while to get the transparency right but in case anyone else is looking for this as a POI icon as well, here's my attempt at making a replica of the Favorite symbol plus the larger version for the menu pages (attached)

Thanks again for the help; so far using the Custom POIs instead of Favorites already definitely seems like a much better plan.

 

[pjmich]

Update Question

I just received my XXL 540 TM WTE and performed a Windows Explorer backup. Entered my code and it took the first time. Then updated from 8.35 to 8.60 map. Everything went smoothly, but it did take a LONG time for the entire process.

Question is, after the updates, my home information and recent destinations were still in the unit. When I check map version it has indeed changed from 8.35 to 8.60. What did I do wrong?

Thanks for the help.

PJ

 

[canderson]

..my home information and recent destinations were still in the unit. When I check map version it has indeed changed from 8.35 to 8.60. What did I do wrong?

Thanks for the help.

PJ

You didn't do anything wrong at all. Owners of older units would kill to have all of their previous goodies still resident after the map upgrade! It's a function of the firmware level. Navcore 8 units blow up the old info in the mapsettings.cfg file by overwriting it during a map update. Units that have Navcore 9 firmware do not. Your 540WTE evidently has firmware 9.XXX (9.053 is current, I think), sparing you the aggravation!