Field notes 4 MIN READ
Strava bulk export: every activity at once
The archive request that gives you years of files in one download. Slow, enormous, and the only way to make a heatmap of everything.
One activity is a file. A year is an archive request.
Where it lives
On strava.com, go to Settings → My Account, and find the section about downloading or deleting your account. Choose to request an archive — not to delete anything, obviously, though the two options sit uncomfortably close together.
Strava builds the archive in the background and emails a download link when it is ready.
What arrives
A zip. Inside it:
- `activities.csv` — one row per activity, with the date, the name, the sport, the distance, the elevation and the filename of the corresponding track. - `activities/` — the track files themselves, mostly `.fit.gz`. Older ones may be GPX or TCX, because the format Strava stored changed over the years. - A great deal else: photos, comments, kudos, route plans, your profile.
The CSV is more useful than it looks. It is the fastest way to find the longest ride of a particular year without opening anything.
What it is good for
A heatmap. Not one route but every route, layered, until the roads you actually use go dark and the one-off trip to the coast stays faint.
That needs everything, and pulling several hundred activities one at a time is not a reasonable afternoon.
Two warnings
Indoor activities are in there and contribute nothing. A winter of turbo sessions is a lot of files with no coordinates. They are skipped, which is correct, but it means the map of a year is a map of the outdoor part of it.
Every file starts at your door. A single route reveals one home. Three hundred routes reveal it three hundred times, converging on one point. That is why the trim is not optional here — on a heatmap it is the whole difference between a portrait of your training and a map to your house.
Questions people actually ask
- How long does the archive take?
- Strava emails a link when it is ready. It usually takes minutes to a few hours depending on how much history you have.
- How big is it?
- Larger than you expect. Several years of activities with photos can run to gigabytes; the activity files themselves are a small part of that.
- What format are the files in?
- Mostly .fit.gz — compressed FIT files, one per activity — with a CSV index listing every activity and its filename. Older activities may be GPX or TCX.
- Do I need this to make a heatmap?
- No, if the account is connected: the connection reads your activities directly. The archive is for people who would rather not connect anything, or who want a permanent copy.
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One effort. One sheet of paper.
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