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

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.