We were able to restore the observations, but I do want to add some extra info.
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we refresh the iNat data on our Staging (aka internal testing) server every Saturday, US time. Basically, that means we import all the observations, IDs, etc from the public site to use on Staging for the next week. If the deleted observations are on Staging, it’s fairly easy for us to restore them. Since @thrasherbird deleted the observations on Sunday (US time) the deleted observations were still on Staging. If the observations had been deleted on, say, Friday, they would have been gone by the time we were alerted to it.
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If the observations are not still on Staging, restoring them is very difficult and time consuming and we generally won’t do it (if it’s even possible) unless the deletions were iNaturalist’s fault.