← Back to all services
Health & Fitness
Strava
Updated Sep 29, 2026
Strava is the social network for runners and cyclists, and its archive is every run, ride and swim since you signed up, one file each, in the format your watch actually recorded. GPS tracks that import anywhere. What it does not publish is a list of what else is inside, so the only way to know is to unzip it and look.
Get Strava →Affiliate link — supports Digital Takeout Day at no extra cost
What you'll get
Every Activity, One File EachActivity Summaries (CSV)Comments and Kudos (Check Your Copy)Your Profile
Before you start
- Go to strava.com on a computer. Do it on the website: Strava's own documentation disagrees with itself about whether the phone app can do this, and the website is the one that is documented to work.
- Open Settings, then the My Account tab. "Download your account" is a section of its own, with "Get Started" underneath it.
- It sits near the account deletion options, which is worth reading carefully rather than clicking on reflex. Delete is a different button and it is not undoable.
How to download
- Click Get Started, then Request download.
- Wait for the email. Strava says a few hours, and a long-standing account can take a day or more. Archives for people who have been on Strava for a decade are regularly multiple gigabytes.
- The link goes to the email address on your Strava profile, which is not necessarily the inbox you are reading this from.
- Download it as soon as it lands. The link is temporary and Strava does not say for how long, so if it has expired by the time you got to it, ask for another.
Pro tip
Two things worth knowing before you trust it. Strava does not publish a list of what the archive contains, and the format has changed over time, so unzip it and see for yourself rather than trusting anyone's summary, including this one. And the social layer is the shaky part: plenty of people report that comments and kudos are not in there, and there is no official commitment either way.
Recommended backup tools
- Amazon SSD — Local copy for fast GPX retrieval, since GPX files are small and benefit from SSD speed
- ProtonDrive — End-to-end encrypted off-site copy of the activity archive
- pCloud — Lifetime storage option for the multi-year activity archive
After the download
- The activities folder holds one file per activity, in the format your device originally uploaded. That is usually a FIT file, sometimes compressed as .fit.gz, and GPX on some accounts. So one archive can contain a mixture, which surprises people.
- Keep the originals rather than the prettiest-looking ones. Strava can regenerate a GPX for any activity, but it cannot regenerate the file your watch wrote, and that file holds the detail a regeneration loses.
- activities.csv is the piece you will still be able to read in ten years: one row per activity. Strava has never published the column list, so open it and find out rather than taking someone's word for what is in it.
- Segments are not in the archive and there is no separate request for them. Strava owns that data. If your times on a particular climb matter to you, write the ones you care about down now.
- One privacy thing to know if you are thinking of closing the account. Strava's privacy policy says public segments and routes stay available after you delete, and that it holds a lasting licence on them. Deleting the account does not take them down.
- Saved routes are not in the archive. A route is a path you planned rather than something you recorded, so Strava exports those one at a time as GPX from the route page.