This past week was not a good one for Garmin. Their ransomware attack was one of the worst that I’ve ever seen. I’ve spent over 20 years in IT and I’ve never seen a company become so paralyzed for so long. Everything seems to be back up and running now, but a lot of people in the fitness communities are asking if it’s time to move away from Garmin. I considered it briefly, but I have one very strong reason for sticking with them, and it’s actually what saved their bacon in this outage.

Direct file access.

Unlike most fitness watches on the market place, you can still plug your Garmin in to your computer and grab your .fit activity files, and do whatever you want with them. It’s why most people were able to continue to upload to sites like Strava just fine during the outage. You can still use the watch, and access your data, without the intervention of an online site. Granted, it’s not as slick and cool as the full interface, but it works, and I know my data is safe. That’s the key.

My wife used to own a Suunto, and their MovesCount platform seemed to have issues periodically. When that happened, she was S.O.L. The Suunto watches don’t have any way for you to get into their file system, leaving your only gateway, the app and online service. Coros appears to be the same as well.

So despite having one of the worst cybersecurity breaches in history, I’m going to stick with the tried and true, that gives me the most flexibility at getting access to my data. Thanks Garmin for that, even if you need to work on your cybersecurity infrastructure.