I only make an attempt to save my original photos of organisms that are rarely documented photographically. I’ve had several requests from authors of books etc. to use my original photos. iNat’s backup processes are far better than I could ever afford, and if global society goes so far down the drain that it doesn’t value iNat, and iNat is discarded by society, well…having pics of critters would be the least of my concerns.
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As far as there bieng no loss of data:
This Western pond turtle observation does still have the IDs and discussion spanning August 23-26:
However, my dashboard lost the notification of it; as far as my dashboard knows, nothing happened between August 17 and Aug 29:
So, the data that really count (observations and their IDs and discussions) was not lost, but I was momentarily a bit discombobulated at the loss of dashboard data. It is reassuring to know that if something is going to give, the site developers have taken steps to ensure that it won’t be the primary data.
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Notifications are eventually deleted anyway - I can’t remember if it’s after 30 or 90 days, but it’s something like that.
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I’m always trying to get to that point - I know I’ll never look at my old plant pictures, so why go through the trouble of backing up 10s of 1000s of pictures. But then there’s two exceptions I encountered. In one case I took pictures of a common Spiranthes vernalis, and in another of a very common morel mushroom. Turns out one was a rare hybrid (mine is the only observation) and the other was some rare recently described species (mine was only the 3rd or so observation). And so when identifiers started discussing my observations… I could go to my pictures folder and add more pictures to help them! (It probably didn’t help much since the pictures I don’t post to inaturalist are usually the bad quality one… but still, it’s what I always think about now when contemplating deleting my old photos…)
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I’ve gotten pretty good at posting the best, but if there was an out of focus image that had some part in excellent focus that was not in focus in the good photos, I keep it until my next harddrive backup just in case. Once that occurs, I delete the original raw files so if was needed it would be a pain, but i could get to it. I always toss dups or out of focus. For every 100 photos, I probably delete 20% of them, and another 10% are the “in case”, rest are good. But, I have a pretty good keep ratio for my photography.
(Photos I post here are typicaly from my dSLR, and I shoot in RAW, so there is a bit of tweeking / cropping and then saving as jpg before uploading to iNat. I delete the RAW images off my computer’s hard drive after backing things up to my external drive to keep my hard drive freed up).
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I have been wondering if there are any methods to download all of my iNat observations (Set of images, observed date, location, IDs or community IDs, and description) to a hard device, ideally in a condition which I can search and filter those downloaded observations at least by IDs and by observed dates, and in a condition which I can quickly recover my observations if iNat server got destroyed by something (e.g. human error, earthquake, world war III).
I am quite serious about this, because I now spend almost all of my free time for iNaturalist and I would be totally depressed if my observations on iNat were lost.
It would be awesome if all those data can be somehow written as the information attached on images, just like how information of date and time is included in images.
Also, as an alternative way, is it possible to download images I uploaded to iNat but with date and GPS data (of the associated observation) attached as its data?
Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!
Is this the same question you had before?
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/is-there-a-recommended-way-to-backup-all-my-inat-data/35015
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I merged and reopened the topic.
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Whoops, I had the other one as draft and ended up posting the same question twice. Thanks for fixing!
I mean, the photos on iNat aren’t noticeably lower quality (as far as I’ve seen), so I don’t think it’s a huge issue.
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I didn’t think that was possible?
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/trouble-with-multiple-forum-drafts/23009
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I usually save drafts of things using gmail and I was sorting through them. Gmail is pretty useful because you can undo changes
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You can use any of the backup tools that can do this job easily , quickly ,automatically and in particular time(monthly,weekly,daily) . Take a look at Gs Richcopy 360 ,Syncback and Goodsync , all can copy from ftp/sftp to local computers or clouds too
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