Verified cloud storage for a fast growing field platform. No app update. No downtime.
Our client's platform lets users capture photos, videos and signatures in the field every day. All of it lived on a single server disk that was filling up fast. Our automated monitoring raised the alarm with weeks to spare, before a single upload failed. Instead of buying an even bigger disk, we moved the media to secure cloud storage with automatic checks, automatic retries and a daily health email. Every existing app version kept working. From approved plan to live in production took about a day.
Every submission on the platform can carry photos, videos and signatures. That media was stored on one server disk. About 386,000 files took up about 386 GB of a 500 GB disk.
Usage was growing, and growth was speeding up.
Nobody found out the hard way. Our automated monitoring tracks disk usage and growth around the clock, and it flagged this disk while there were still weeks to spare. No uploads failed and no users were affected.
That early warning is what turned a looming outage into a calm, planned upgrade. It's part of the observability standard we apply to the systems we look after.
We looked at three ways to solve it. Only one fixed the problem for good.
Quick, but a cloud server disk can grow and never shrink. The cost rises every month. Daily backups of a bigger disk cost more too.
Our analysis showed most photos and videos were already compressed by the app. The gain was far too small to solve the problem.
Pay only for what is stored. Space is practically unlimited. Prices drop automatically for files that are rarely opened.
We projected the monthly cost of media storage for both paths. The cloud option only gets cheaper per gigabyte as files age.
| When | Cloud storage | Bigger disk + backups |
|---|---|---|
| After 6 monthsabout 1.4 TB | about $18 / month | about $157 / month for the disk, plus backups |
| After 12 monthsabout 2.4 TB | about $26 / month | about $416 / month |
Projected costs in USD for media storage only.
The goal was simple. Make storage limitless and safe without anyone noticing a change.
Photos and videos upload exactly as before. Every Android app version and the web portal kept working with no update.
Every 5 minutes new files are copied to secure cloud storage. Nobody has to press a button.
Each file's digital fingerprint is compared with its cloud copy before it counts as safe. A damaged copy is rejected.
If a copy fails it is retried up to 5 times, 5 minutes apart. Only then is it flagged for attention.
Sent every day at 18:00, even when all is well. A missing email is itself a warning. Any failed file is listed once.
Storage is private, encrypted and reachable only by our server. Deleted or overwritten files can be recovered for 35 days. Designed with POPIA in mind.
Photos and signatures captured in the field are personal information. South Africa's Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA) requires that it is kept secure and not lost, damaged or accessed without permission. The new storage was designed with that in mind from day one.
We tested on a separate development system first, then again in production. We didn't just check the happy path. We tried to break it.
Files removed from the server still showed. We removed live files and confirmed they still displayed from the cloud in the web portal, the Android app and PDF reports.
Forced failures were caught. We hid a file before it could be copied. It was retried 5 times, 5 minutes apart, then flagged for the daily email. Exactly as designed.
It recovers by itself. We hid a file, let it fail once, then put it back. It copied on the next run with no manual action.
Replaced photos stay correct. We swapped a photo mid way through a submission. Only the new photo was kept and shown.
Saved and resumed work holds up. We saved and resumed a submission several times with photos and a video. Every version copied and displayed correctly.
From the first warning to a fully migrated platform, with time to spare.
Automated monitoring flagged the disk's accelerating growth long before it could fill up.
Problem analysed, costs compared and plan approved by the client. Built and tested on the development system the same day.
Deployed with no downtime and tested with real submissions. About 389,000 existing files were queued for the cloud in 16 seconds.
The copy ran in the background around the clock, with new uploads always going first. Every existing file is now safely in the cloud.
The storage deadline is gone. The platform's media now lives in storage that grows with the business, costs a fraction of the alternative and checks itself every day.
Practically unlimited room for photos, videos and signatures for the full 5 year retention period. Monitoring keeps watching, just in case.
About 389,000 existing files copied to the cloud and checked against their fingerprints before any clean up.
Storage projected to cost around 15 times less than growing the disk, and it keeps getting cheaper as files age.
Whether it's disk space, rising cloud bills or a system that's outgrown its first design, we can help you find the fix that lasts.
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