My question: You have an WU-API key why do you not want to use your own data you are uploading to WU then?
But do whatever you want to do. It is your data and you can make as much backups as you want.
An other user is also saving the yearly data while not using WU.
If doing so, you have to adapt the scripts to display that saved data. Otherwise what is the use of that “old” data?
I will try to explain as good as I can why you should use WU and others:
The PWS_Dashboard does not have a SQL-database to store your weather-data.
The PWS_Dashboard is not designed to do that.
It uses your realtime (+ optional daily H/L) data to display your interesting weather-values.
It also supports graphs for any day and any period when using free WU data.
If users are unwilling to use WU: they get some minimal graphs. Detailed for today and summarized for 30/360 graph.
WU/IBM stores your daily values with 1 record / 5minutes. It also aggregates it to daily-data with 1 line / day.
Other weather-nets like pwsweather.com or awekas.de work exactly the same way.
You can store all your weather-data for free at at least 3 different sites and retrieve the data in different formats to use for whatever reason you have.
So if you do not like WU, use pwsweather.com, they save your data and give you for free a free Aeris forecast and even free maps allowance.
Or use Awekas, also saves your uploads which you can retrieve anytime you want. Have a few other nice things to use on your site also.
Or buy a raspberryPI.
Install WeatherDisplay to store your data in an SQL database.
Or install Meteobridge which stores 1 minute data in the integrated database and has large graphing possibilities.
Wim.
P.S. There are multiple other nice scripts which use WU data. For instance these two scripts which I wrote and maintain.
https://pws.sluispark.be/index.php?frame=Reports_at_WU
https://pws.sluispark.be/index.php?frame=History_at_WU
You can use them for free in PWS_Dashboard as described here: External scripts which use WeatherUnderground .CSV data