An end to BirdBase support - what now? (1 Viewer)

At age 88 I can understand why Robert Eisberg of Santa Barbara Software is standing down. But with my 50,000+ entries into his software/database I am a bit concerned about future compatibility with Windows 10 for starters, and on out into the future after that.

I fear wholesale translating my records straight into eBird using the BB2eB utility, for a variety of reasons. And have gotten very used to the utility of BirdBase. Not real sure of going 100% into such a solution.

Has anyone else done this?

What other solutions do people see in this situation?

I just found out about this (when I went to the BirdBase/Santa Barbara Web page and found it gone!), so am in the same boat. A search led me to a discussion of this on surfbirds.com, and a recommendation and good discussion about iGoTerra as an alternative to eBird. I've seen no mention of an alternative with installed records; both of those (and also AviBase, I believe) keep one's data "in the cloud."

I'm not sure what your concerns are about BB2eB, but one person wrote in response to one of my questions, "The import from e.g. Birdbase, Avisys or others to iGoTerra will catch and display any 'own' splits/renames/lumps/spelling errors/etc and these can then be dealt with manually through some simple-to-use tools."

I assume it's OK to put in a link to a "competing" forum...

BirdBase Alternatives

Hello Steve:

I am posting this tardy reply on the off-chance that you are still looking for an alternative to BirdBase.

I just found out today that it is no longer being supported and so I have been reviewing alternatives and have tested two different applications so far, Scythebill and Birder's Diary.

Both will import your BirdBase data and both imports seemed to work well for me. Use BirdBase to export your data to a data exchange file first and use that file as input to either of these applications.

Both applications hold your data on your own computer, no need for cloud storage.

Scythebill is free, Birder's Diary must be purchased but it offers a full featured 30 day trial.

Scythebill will produce trip reports in taxonomic sequence.

So far in my testing it appears that Birder's Diary produces trip reports in date entered sequence. In my case I asked for a report for a 3 day period that included 3 separate trip reports. The list of birds came out in date order with taxonomic sequence within each day. Could just be me still learning to use the program.

There is another program called SWIFT that I also plan to check out but I have yet to download it.

Hope this helps

Aitona

Hi there
I am also very interested in what software is available to which I can import a lifetime (> 60 years) of birding records from Birdbase files. I backed up my files before switching to Windows 10 which is refusing to open Birdbase. Surely this is an issue which many old-timers like me have encountered and solved.

Altona's suggestions look good. Any others?

AVISYS Stopped working

Today when I tried to open Avisys it said it could not find the data. I used restorer.exe and got past the could not find data,but still got STATES.AVI missing. I have looked at backups and cannot find this file in any of them. It tells me I have an I/O error 6 and then shuts done. Help anyone. I have over 2800 species in this data and probably 50,000 sighting. Losing all this will be a disaster.

Thanks

Skip Almoney