Backup: what if iNat suddenly disappeared

I have no idea what HDD and SDD are. I have a couple backup hard drives that I shifted a lot of my older files to. I also realized that I have no need for dozens or hundreds of photos of common species, so I deleted them. I hope iNaturalist has adequate backup! The only help I’m going to contribute to it, though is monetary (small yearly donations).

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If iNat allows robot crawling by sites like the Internet Archive, then we have a buffed chance to survive an Alexandrian-fire type event here. ;)

Given the repeated legal attacks against the Internet Archive, I’m not sure which one is more likely to go the way of the dodo…

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I use Adobe Lightroom to edit my photos. Upon import to Lightroom, I have the filename changed to year/day/time format. Notes are saved in the comments section (equivalent to my field notes) and automatically upload with my photos and appear in the Notes section of the observation. I keyword all my photos in a taxonomical, nested structure. But you could just keyword with the “final” species ID and Lightroom will automatically write that keyword (and comments) into the exif data, if you enable that feature. When I need to update a keyword or my notes on a particular observation, I just use filter-by-date in Lightroom and scan for the identical photo(s). For sound recordings, I change the date/time-based name by adding the obs # & species name, when known. I back up my photos and recordings regularly. If iNaturalist or Adobe go out of business, I hope to still have the photos & recordings, which are arranged in folders by year and searchable by keywords in most photo viewers.

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I may be atypically and unnecessarily paranoid, but the idea of entrusting my photos/observations exclusively to the internet, be it iNaturalist or elsewhere, gives me the shivers :neutral_face:. Bad things happen and the way I see it is… if it’s worth observing and recording, then it’s worth keeping. I have a very similar system to @becksnyc based on metadata, file names, folder structure and Lightroom, together with regular backups of my entire photo archive. There’s a 99.999% possibility that that 2007 photo of Poa annua in the car park of the local supermarket will never be of any use to anyone… but you never know :thinking:.
Incidentally…

Actually it doesn’t. If you click on the “i” symbol reproduced on the centre bottom of each photo, it opens a window with all the available metadata, including the filename. I’d love to be able to also search by filename, but that isn’t yet possible. In particular cases, I also copy the url of the observation and save it with the photo as metadata, but that presupposes some form of metadata management software, such as Lightroom.

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