Over the past six years, I’ve taken more than 17,000 photos while visiting construction sites—capturing inspections, documenting conditions, and tracking construction progress. Every photo represents a moment in the life of a project. All of these images were taken on a Samsung Note 10 Plus, and I believed they were safely backed up to Dropbox.

That assumption proved to be wrong.

After the phone’s screen was damaged and I upgraded to an S24 FE, I discovered that thousands of photos had never been backed up. Losing them was not an option, especially since many contain GPS metadata that ties each image to a specific location—critical for site records and historical reference.

Rethinking the Backup Strategy

I chose to back up the remaining photos to Google Photos because it preserves GPS metadata and allows photos to be viewed directly on Google Maps. This makes it much easier to revisit where each image was taken and understand the context of past site conditions.

The challenge, however, was that the Note 10 Plus screen was no longer reliably responsive.

When the OTG Setup Failed

My first workaround was using an OTG cable with a cordless Logitech mouse. A USB-C OTG (On-The-Go) cable allows a USB-C device (like a phone or tablet) to act as a host, connecting peripherals (flash drives, keyboards, mice, cameras) directly to its port, enabling data transfer and device control, often converting the Type-C port to a standard USB-A female port for legacy devices, and modern USB-C itself supports OTG features natively through Dual Role Power/Data. These cables/adapters are essential for expanding device functionality, though support depends on the host device itself, with some premium versions offering better materials or angled designs. This allowed me to navigate the phone, keep the screen active, and start the backup process. For a short time, this solution worked.

After about a day, the OTG setup stopped functioning properly. At that point, I decided not to continue with another cable. The reason was simple but critical: I could not charge the phone and use the mouse at the same time, and without continuous interaction, the phone would go into idle mode, causing the backup process to stop.

A Stylus-Based Solution

Instead, I turned to the S Pen stylus, which still responded on the damaged screen. Using the stylus, I was able to relaunch the Google Photos backup. Since the app must remain open and the screen active for uninterrupted uploads, I improvised a simple but effective solution—leaning the stylus against the screen so the tip maintained constant contact and prevented the phone from going idle.

Progress Through Persistence

After four days of continuous effort, the backup is well underway. At this point, there are approximately 9,000 photos left to upload.

This experience reinforced two key lessons:

Never assume a backup is complete—verify it.

Sometimes problem-solving in the digital world looks a lot like problem-solving on a construction site: adapt, improvise, and keep going until the job is done.

The process isn’t finished yet, but the most important thing is happening: the data is being preserved