Are My Lists Backed Up?

We take daily backups of the whole system and keep these for several months so if we have a crash for whatever reason, or do something silly and delete all the lists, we can get them back without too much trouble. (Backups are actually stored in two different continents as well, so we should be safe against most natural or man-made disasters!) We can also normally restore someone's list from backup if they make a silly mistake themselves, like deleting the wrong list. (Although this can be time-consuming, so we'd appreciate a small donation if we have to do something like this.)

You can also download any lists yourself in order to keep your own backup - when you view a list you will see a row of icons on the right hand side. The last three of these allow you to download in text, csv or Excel format. You see these when viewing anyone's list, but it is best to do the download when logged in to "My Lists" - this way if you've marked any species as sensitive you'll still get the details included in the download.

Although BUBO Listing takes quite a lot of our time to keep the base checklists up to date, the day by day running can happen without our intervention. So if we really decided we got so bored and didn't want to continue it would happily chug along anyway, until we stopped paying our hosting fees. We would of course give plenty of notice if this was to happen, so people would easily have time to download their lists. If the worst case scenario happened, and Andy and I were hit by buses (simultaneously in England and India even!) the system would keep going until my credit card paying the hosting fees got stopped. Hopefully by this time someone would have realised and would have been able to give users notice to download their lists!

So hopefully we've covered most scenarios, and look forward to you all being lifelong BUBO Listers!