I lost my baby’s first words video (and Google Photos saved me)

Thought I’d tell you the story of how that previous video was more than just my baby’s first words video, it’s also the first and most important video that accidentally got deleted.

I don’t know how it got deleted. I remember taking the video, I posted it to Facebook which pixelated it all to hell, screwed the audio up, and made it look like total garbage. I went to upload it to YouTube and it’s simply not there.

Not in deleted, not moved, it’s just no longer on the phone.

All I can figure out is either Facebook deleted it (highly unlikely,) or when baby knocked my phone out of my hand a few minutes later she managed to hit delete and yes.

So two minutes into having this video it’s gone. Dropbox hadn’t uploaded it because i was below the magic unconfigurable threshold by where Dropbox just stops working in the name of saving you battery (seriously dropbox: 25% battery is another 6-8 hours for me, upload my damned video).

Fortunately the day was saved by Google Play Photos. I found a backed up copy there because it’s not a backup service that will just crap out in the name of battery savings.

I downloaded the video from Google Photos, uploaded it to my YouTube channel, and bam, day saved.

What really bites though is that Dropbox is a pay backup service with no ability to function once the battery reaches a point at which it theoretically could still last for days. If I hadn’t been paranoid and said screw the battery savings for Google Photos, all that would be left is a really bad version on Netflix.

So yeah, make sure you set up Google Photos to back your stuff up. That first words video could wind up a victim of dropbox’s unconfigurable battery management.