Fatty — iPhone Photo & Video Backup

The Challenge

iPhones fill up with photos and videos, and the usual answer is a cloud subscription that keeps those memories on someone else's servers. Plugging in a drive should be simpler, but a plain copy says nothing about whether every file actually arrived intact.

People did not need another account. They needed an independent copy they could trust before deciding what to keep on the phone.

Our Solution

We built Fatty around one promise: a copy you can trust. Connect a USB-C drive, tap Back Up, and Fatty copies the original photo and video resources Apple makes available, with no recompression and no conversion. Then it reads every saved file back from the drive and checks its SHA-256 fingerprint against the source. A file counts as done only after that check passes.

Fatty creates the backup and never deletes anything on the phone. Removing media from the iPhone stays a separate decision.

What We Built

• A native iPhone app on the App Store for iOS 17 and later.
• One-tap backup to a compatible external drive over USB-C, with the destination remembered when iOS allows.
• Incremental backups: later runs pick up only new, changed, unfinished or previously failed items, and can continue from saved checkpoints after an interruption.
• Read-back verification of every saved file by SHA-256, with a clear view of what finished, what needs another try and when the last backup completed.
• Original-quality copies, including available Live Photo pairs, RAW alternates and full-size edits; originals stored in iCloud are retrieved when needed.
• An open archive of ordinary files organised by year and month, readable on a Mac or Windows computer without the app, plus drive capacity, archive size, backup history and an in-app browser for saved media.
• A seven-day free trial confirmed by Apple and a one-time Lifetime Access purchase, with no subscription, Restore Purchases and Family Sharing.

How We Delivered

Process

We started from the failure people fear most, a backup that looks finished but is not, and made verification the centre of the product rather than a setting.

Design

A focused, instrument-like interface: dark, monospaced, one status and one action per screen, so progress, verification and results read at a glance.

Build

A native iOS app that works directly with the Photos library and external storage: incremental, resumable and verified, with no Fatty servers in the path of anyone's media.

Launch & Support

Released on the App Store in October 2026 with its own product, privacy and support pages.

Results & Value Delivered

A copy you can prove

Every file is checked against its source fingerprint before it is marked complete.

The media stays with its owner

No account, no uploads to Fatty servers, no ads and no tracking. The archive lives on the owner's drive as ordinary files.

Only what is new

After the first run, backups copy what is new or changed instead of the whole library.

Capabilities Used