I logged into my app for the first time since last fall and everything is missing. I ported everything to a new phone (same model just newer). It managed to work for every other app I have so why would there be an issue with this one? worked hard last summer to collect and save observations. I feel now that I cannot trust this app to start using it again. Extremely disappointed.
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Welcome to the forum @sherryd709. Could you possibly provide some more details (e.g. iPhone or Android, what version no. the app is), possibly screenshots, just so we can figure out what’s going on.
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Was your username the same before? I see no observations under this name. It was iNat app, not Seek, right?
If you submitted the observations, they are in iNaturalist’s system and should show up on your phone when you login. Once they are submitted, they don’t have to be kept on the phone. Perhaps you never submitted them to iNaturalist?
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As others have said once the files are uploaded to iNat they are now on the iNat servers and should be viewable from any device. Switching phones should not make a difference.
@fffffffff touches on two important points;
- Perhaps you registered a new profile by mistake on the new phone? You think there is nothing because it is the wrong profile?
- Are you sure you weren’t using seek? Seek is the more basic sister app to iNat. Observations from seek can be sent to an iNat account, so I could see the confusion if so.
If you give a little more basic info it should be easy to find an alternate account if that’s the case. What date/time range and location were most of your observations from? Anything in particular you remember observing? By cross-referencing the location to some observations it should be pretty easy to see if the observations are still out there somewhere.
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Thanks for your replies. I was using the Seek app but just assumed the app was saving them. So these need to be posted here to ensure they are saved?
Seek is mostly oriented on people with bigger privacy concerns, like minors, it saves your records on the phone only (unless something got changed). iNaturalist is a separate website with own separate app, and it saves all your observations in a database where other people check and help to id your observations. You can read more here https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/help or on this forum.
If you log in to iNaturalist via Seek, you’ll see this notice:
Observations are saved only in Seek unless they are posted to iNat. But note that observations on iNat can’t be synced back to Seek, it’s a one-way connection.
If you have an iPhone that you back up, you can restore your Seek observations from that backup if you need to, which I had to do last week after my phone sailed out of my pocket into San Francisco Bay as I tried to get a sweet bird shot. I’m not sure that’s possible with Android backups.
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