Backups
What is in a backup file, when a restore is refused, and how to undo one. For the walkthrough, see Backup and Restore.
What is in the file
A backup is a single zip:
trusty-track.db— everything about every race: racers, dens, heats, results, settings, and the activity log. It is captured safely even if the timer records a heat mid-backup.uploads/— the racer and car photographs. They travel with the results because the results alone would restore an event whose pictures were all missing.manifest.json— when the backup was taken and by which version.
The file is named for the moment it was taken.
What a backup does not contain
Stored instant-replay clips are never included,
whether or not Keep replay clips
is turned on. They live in their own folder on the machine, separate from
uploads/, and a backup never reads it — the same reasoning that keeps a
racer's photograph in the file: a video of the finish line is a video of
children too, and it is not the kind of thing that should ride along in an
archive by accident. Restoring a backup always starts with no stored clips
at all, however many were kept before.
What a restore does
Restoring replaces everything currently in the app with the backup's contents, then reloads the page back onto Settings → Backup, with a message naming when the restored backup was taken. Every other screen — displays, the check-in tablet, a second operator tab — learns the race list itself changed and refreshes it on its own, so a race picker or a browser tab title never goes stale. A screen that was showing one specific race, though — a display's Live view, Race Control open to a particular event — does not leave that page by itself, since the race id it was showing may now belong to something else entirely. Reload those by hand once the restore is done.
Nothing is touched unless the whole file checks out first, so a refusal costs nothing.
When a restore is refused
| Message | What it means |
|---|---|
| Not a readable Trusty Track backup | The file is damaged, or is not a backup — a photo, the wrong zip |
| Taken from a newer version of Trusty Track | The backup holds data this version does not understand yet. Update Trusty Track and try again |
A backup from an older version restores fine and is brought up to date automatically — the same path an old database takes at startup.
Undoing a restore
What was replaced is kept on the machine, beside the restored copy:
trusty-track.db.pre-restoreuploads.pre-restore/
Both are in the data folder (~/.trustytrack unless changed). Renaming
them back undoes the restore. Only the most recent restore is kept this
way: restore twice and the first copy is gone.
Who can do it
Operator-only once an operator PIN is set — a backup holds every racer's name and photograph, and a restore replaces a running event. With no PIN set, anyone on the network can do either, which is one more reason to set one.