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Managing Storage Space on Your Garmin Outdoor or Marine Handheld

Garmin® Outdoor and Marine handhelds have reserved internal memory for data, such as waypoints, routes, tracks, activities, and geocaches. Most also have a slot for a microSD card.

Handhelds have limitations on the amount of data they can read, regardless of whether the data is on the internal memory or microSD card. The limitations are more than a typical user needs.

As such, there is no benefit to placing data on the microSD card instead of keeping it on the device itself. The only reason for having a microSD card is to store additional mapping.

Understandably, the amount of data in the device can cause concerns about any adverse impact on the device's performance.

NOTE: User data created on the device can only be saved to the internal memory.

If you:

  • Think you may be reaching the limitations of your device

  • Want to be proactive in removing older data

  • Notice your device's performance is becoming slower

You can back up important user data from the device to the computer using our BaseCamp™ program, and then delete the data from the device via the computer too. For steps, see - Backing Up, Viewing And Transferring Data Using Garmin BaseCamp and Deleting GPX Files From an Outdoor Device.

For more details on checking the data limitations of your handheld and how much space you have available, refer to the sections below.


Data Limitations on Outdoor and Marine Handhelds

Select the link to the product below for a list of user data limitations for your outdoor handheld:

How to Check the Available Space on Your Handheld

The process to check the available space on your handheld is as follows:

NOTE: The eTrex® SE, eTrex® Solar, Foretrex® 801, Foretrex® 901, GPSMAP® 67, GPSMAP® 67i, Montana® 710, Montana® 710i, and Montana® 760i outdoor devices use MTP mode, which prevents them from appearing as a separate drive on Mac computers. For these devices, a Windows computer must be used.

  1. Connect the Garmin device to a computer.

  2. Locate the drive for your device.

    HINT: The drive will be labeled Garmin, or the name of your device.

    • Windows:

      1. Press the Windows key + E on the keyboard to open Windows Explorer/File Explorer.

      2. Select This PC (Windows 10 & 11 only).

      3. Locate the drive for your Garmin .

    • Mac:

      1. Open Finder.

      2. Select Go in the menu bar at the top of the screen.

      3. Select Computer.

      4. Locate the drive for your Garmin.

  3. Highlight the drive.

  4. Examine the drive's properties.

    • Windows: Right-click on the drive, and select Properties.

    • Mac: Press the space bar on the keyboard after highlighting the drive.

The free or available space should now be displayed.