you can clone the structure of the system, but you wouldn’t have the data, as far as i know. you’d have to build something to import the data into your own version of the system, and if you’re going to do that, it’d be easier probably to just set up your own simplified database / system rather than trying to set up an iNat clone.
i’m not trying to make anyone worry, since iNat’s processes for backing things up are probably already plenty, but i don’t think GBIF has copies of the images / sounds. i think those live only over on iNat.
some considerations:
- observation timestamps often have hour and minutes but lack seconds. the time zones can be unreliable. if multiple photos are attached to a given observation, those photos may not share the same underlying timestamps.
- photo page metadata may contain the original photo timestamps and coordinates, but as noted before, there’s not really a great interface to access that data.
- observation timestamps and locations can be manually set. sometimes the photo metadata may not accurately reflect the time the image was taken, such as if the photo is extracted manually from a video.
in the absence of a good way to get photo metadata from the system, i think this is probably true. but it may be worth thinking about what happens if a user has multiple similar versions of an image. you could probably use the information about the original image size (which is available via the API) to differentiate between differently-sized variants of an image (ex. an image sized for the web vs an image for print), but you might not be able to distinguish between very subtly different images such as a series of burst or bracketed shots.