Deleted activities not deleted from Sauce

[MrSpock77]

Problem: Activities deleted from Strava are not automatically deleted from Sauce.

Background: Some people (including myself) sometimes use multiple devices to log an activity. I always delete duplicates before making them public, but they still remain in my Sauce if not deleted manually. This is hard to monitor for users that I follow in Sauce Performance. They may put some duplicates public automatically, and delete them after a while. I think the Fitness Tracking may be invalid due to this.

[mayfield]

I've had a good think about this in the past. It's a bit more complicated than it might seem, but I do want to improve the synchronization of deleted activities.

[mayfield]

Support email notes from user:

I find it weird that deleted activities are not removed from the Fitness Tracker (i.e TSS for that day) even after an explicit resync. In my opinion, this is a must have feature. I often combine activities (would be another sweet feature to have, not gonna lie) and delete the single activities or I split activities (eg. race on zwift and cool down after) and just by accident I discovered that the original activities are not removed.

And my email response with some musings:

You can delete activities from the Sauce DB individually right now, but I've not worked out a safe way to delete activities for various situations where the activity list is actually incomplete. For example if you're coaching an athlete and the athlete has a private profile, they can still send the coach the backup files by hand. Today, this works fine, but if the sync engine assumes that any activities not found during an activity scan are deleted, it would just immediately remove all of them. Also if there are network issues or bugs in the sync engine I didn't want to accidentally delete all the data as this would have horrendous consequences. Although, I'm less worried about the latter at this point as it's been working pretty well.

I do have a few ideas on how I can safely handle certain activity deletes and provide a UX experience for making it easier to rectify deleted activities as well. Essentially, by tagging activities that don't have an activity backing anymore and providing a prompt asking if the user would like to save them or delete them en masse. I might also just provide some options for each athlete config that dictate how activity deletion should be handled.

[mayfield]

Just adding notes that I recently looked into this again and I'm punting yet again. As strange as it seems I haven't found a good way to efficiently test for a missing activity shy of doing a full activity scan (takes several minutes and is highly network intensive).

[atoponce]

Just came here to ask about removing deleted activities from the log. I guess the only current option is to delete the extension and resync? I imagine that'll take days to weeks depending on the size of the athlete's activity history.

[mayfield]

I guess the only current option is to delete the extension and resync?

No that would be a disaster. Before you do anything else, please make a backup of your data. Then you'll never have to endure that long sync process again. Walkthrough on that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5JAMvsu39A

And to the point of this issue, you can always click the Edit button of an activity you want to delete from the Activity Details sidebar (right side) and then Delete it from there. This issue is specifically focused on trying to automatically determine when it's safe to automate this (which I've not been able to find a method I feel comfortable with so far).

[atoponce]

I was thinking about how to determine which activities can be deleted. How about a tailing 7-day window? Given that the standard "acute training load (ATL)" is a weighted 7-day average of your training load, when Sauce syncs the activity, it checks the previous 7 days of cached activities for potential deletions. This might balance the network load without getting in trouble of API limits while still keeping good performance.