My phone is going in for repair — how do I protect my photos?

Why repairs are dangerous to evidence

Standard IT and repair-shop practice treats a phone as replaceable and its apps as reinstallable. For Buildsnapper that assumption is catastrophic: photos that have not been sent in a report exist only inside the app's storage on that phone — never uninstall or reinstall the app or clear its data. A well-meaning technician who reinstalls "to fix a glitch", or a warranty department that ships back a factory-fresh unit, deletes evidence that can require excavation to retake.

Manufacturer and insurance repairs are the highest risk: many mail-in services wipe or replace the device as a matter of routine, whatever the fault.

Before the phone leaves your hands

Do these in order — the goal is at least one verified copy of everything before anyone else touches the device:

1. Send any reports that are ready to send. A sent report is the strongest backup: the PDF and the plot's photo archive are stored with us, and your assessor can reach them for as long as the report stands.
2. Take a full phone backup.

• iPhone: Settings → your name → iCloud → iCloud Backup → Back Up Now (or a computer backup via Finder/iTunes). Apple's backups include the app's photo store.
• Android: a Google cloud backup does not carry the app's photos — the reliable route, if the phone runs Android 12 or later, is a device-to-device transfer to another Android phone. On Android 11 or older that leaves the photos behind too: send what you can and contact support before the phone goes in.

1. Verify the gallery safety net. Every photo taken with version 2.0 or later also lands in the phone's photo gallery at full resolution with its location (older photos may have a copy without one, or none). Check those copies are backed up: iCloud Photos on iPhone, Google Photos backup on Android — and confirm you can actually see recent site photos at icloud.com/photos or photos.google.com from another device.
2. If the repair is a wipe-risk repair (motherboard, warranty replacement, water damage) and you have a spare or new phone, do a full migration to it first, verify the photos in the app there, and treat the migrated phone as your evidence device.

What to tell the repairer — in writing

Put this in the booking notes, email or ticket, not just in conversation:

This phone contains legally required building-compliance photographs inside an app's private storage. Do not uninstall, reinstall or clear data on any app, and do not factory-reset or replace the device, without contacting me first.

If the repairer says a wipe or replacement is unavoidable, stop and complete the backup/migration steps above before agreeing. If they cannot promise data preservation and you cannot back up first (dead phone), tell them the data matters more than the repair speed — board-level data recovery is possible on many "dead" phones.

When the phone comes back

Open Buildsnapper before anything else and check your plots: thumbnails showing, a few photos opened full-screen. If anything looks wrong, change nothing on the phone and contact support — choosing "Evidence at risk on site" if a deadline is at risk.