Saving an area before you head out
Save the area while you still have a connection, ideally in the driveway of the last place you had bars. Pan the map over the neighbourhood you are working and save it. The mistake is driving to an unfamiliar area and discovering on arrival that you have no signal and nothing stored, because the map cannot download streets it has never seen.
When to do it
Before you leave, or at the last point you had a connection. It takes seconds on a normal connection, and it is the one step that makes everything else work.
How much to save
The area you intend to work plus a margin. Saving far more than you need is not free — storage is capped and old areas get evicted — but under-saving is the more painful error because it fails in the field.
What happens if you forget
The map for that area is blank until you have a connection again. Your existing doors and dispositions are still there; it is the basemap underneath them that is missing.
Common questions
- How long does saving an area take?
- Seconds on a normal connection. It is a progress bar, not a wait.
- What if I forget to save?
- That part of the map will be blank until you reconnect. Save it in the driveway of the last place you had bars.
- Do saved areas expire?
- They are evicted when storage fills, least recently used first. An area untouched for months may need saving again.
More on working offline
Dead zones, saved maps and field reliability — the wedge, and the thing reps complain about most.