In March, I got an email from a guy named Andrew Friedman. It said, Brett, I am desperately trying to get in touch with Jonathan Kaplan of The Melt and more importantly, Flip Video fame. To make a long and bizarre story very short, I have a flip video cam that I believe has on it a video of my late father in law playing with my son. Without boring you with too much detail, the camera, the flip Video it was a small, simple video recorder that was pretty
popular in the mid two thousand's. I had a few myself, and I remember using it to film my kids taking their very first steps. Good Daddy is dad? He needs to talk on the phone. Go Izzy. I vaguely remember the flip video. Most people called it the flip Cam. It was good for shooting home videos. But the company shut down a while ago, right, and that's why Andrew was writing. His camera was broken and he was having trouble fixing it. Three data recovery companies told me today
that they don't deal with Flip Video. I can't tell you how difficult it is to get reliable intel about a product that, by tech standards is prehistoric. Andrew had a cherished video stuck on his device, and he didn't have a way to get it back. As a last resort, Andrew decided he needed to find the flip cam founder, Jonathan Caplin, and that's why he emailed me. I'm hoping you might be able to help me out. Either give me a way to contact him, forward this email to him,
anything if he's willing to contact Thanks Andrew. I've written an article on Jonathan Caplan a few years ago. I still had some contacts I could try to call, so we decided to help. I'm Brad Stone and I'm Christy Westgard and this week under cryptod we're on a mission to get Andrews video back. This season, we're exploring the
unintended consequences of technology. Our story today takes a look at the tech industry's constant race for the next big thing and how that sometimes comes at a hidden cost to you and me, the consumers of technology. Just as we get used to one set of apps and gadgets, we find out that the industry has moved on, leaving us stuck. Stay with us. Andrew lives in New Jersey with his wife, Ginger, and their two young children. One evening, Andrew and Ginger were watching a popular NBC family drama,
This is Us, like they do every week. It might have been the super Bowl. In the post super Bowl episode in which one of the characters was thinking about her dad's passing and on the anniverse three of her dad's testing Every year watches a video tape that her
dad made of her when she was a kid. Um and in this particular episode, the VHS tape got destroyed in an in an old fashioned dcr Um and her fiance went to sort of great pains to try to get the tape restored and find somebody who could school it back together like everybody used to have to do on VAJ tapes. Ginger's father had passed away just about five years ago, and watching that episode gave Andrew an idea.
He went upstairs to look in the corner of a closet for a flip cam he hadn't used for many years. He wanted to find a video of Ginger and her dad they had filmed around the time when their first child was born all these years later. Andrew was a little fuzzy on exactly what was in the video, but he said Ginger remembered. Her memory of this tape is that we made it. Probably I shot it um in when we were in the hospital while she was in labor with my son, who is now six years old.
You know, it was exciting to be there while we were about to have our first son. But also there were certainly a tone of sadness in the room. That's because Ginger's father was battling cancer. The family knew he didn't have much time left. Um, would you mind telling me a little bit about your father in law? Sure? Um, Sorry, that was the one question I wasn't quite ready for it. Um. He died a few months asked, maybe even a month after his seventieth birthday. Um. He was a wonderful father,
a wonderful human, a wonderful man, a wonderful everything. It is impossible to overstate how important my wife's father was to my wife and what he meant to her. If this flip cam could bring a little bit of that man back to the family, Andrew would try to salvage it. Almost immediately, things got complicated. Andrew hadn't used his camera for years, and it wouldn't turn on, and flip cams
hadn't been in production for over seven years. In two thousand nine, Cisco, the giant technology company, bought Pure Digital Technologies, the company that made the flip cam. But two years later in Cisco's broader consumer unit was having trouble, so Cisco killed the flip camp and they laid off fifty people. That minute, stopped manufacturing the flip cam, and it also stopped all the customer service support to This kind of
thing is more common than you might think. What happened to the geo cities, the friends, Stirr's, the my spaces, all of those are where our digital library are digital memories live, and we're a little stuck. That's Brewster Kale. He runs a nonprofit called the Internet Archive. They hope to catalog every web page, old computer, game, piece of software, song, video, book, and more, you name it, and they're trying to get
their hands on it. Brewster says, this problem Andrew was facing happens to people all the time, and we're increasingly vulnerable to it as we keep more and more of our memories and our data online. And now we have even more of a problem because a lot of our memories are on Facebook, Twitter, um, YouTube, Flicker, and those are naming the ones that are still alive. Yet those
companies go away or they just change direction. Apple Computer, Um, they had mobile Me that was their web hosting platform. It was two terabytes of other people's stuff, but they just said we're going to turn it off. And when they said they're going to turn it off, it just went away. Apple replaced mobile Me with the now ubiquitous I Class out. The company did warn that it would be switching over to give users time to jump ship,
but on June two twelve, everything left was deleted. And if it could happen to Apple customers, it could happen to anyone. I mean, I personally like to use Google Photos to back up all of my images when I don't have enough space on my iPhone, and I can't really imagine what I do if that platform were to just go down. Yeah, and just think of what losing I Cloud would mean. I mean, that service can store up to two terabytes of information for every single one
of its hundreds of millions of active customers. So, with no customer service number to call, Andrew tried online forums to revive his dead flip cam. Started googling online um things like flip video instruction Flip Video Manual, how to reset flip video flip video camera won't power on. Andrew tried a few of the tips, but none of them worked. Finally came across one that no did that there was a little pin prick reset button built into the camera.
Looked and found that, but was afraid, for sort of the obvious reason too, to trigger it, not knowing if it would wipe out the memory of the camera. After a couple of days of trying to fix the flip cam on his own, Andrew started calling data recovery experts. I mean I called three data recovery companies. One was what are you talking about? Two We're sorry, we don't do that click more or less. Um. None of them were willing to go near this. All said that they
dealt only with external storage devices. What I sort of expected to happen was someone would say to me, sure, bringing your camera for two hundred bucks, three hundred bucks, we can do it. And figured they would take the camera, they would do three minutes of work, they would get the video. They would charge me three for three minutes of work. And I was signed with that, Like I was willing to be suckered on this one. If I
could get the video. I called two of the data recovery companies that Andrew remembered, using right with you, please hold both on site and in lab twenty four hours a day, seven days per week, so if you suffer data loss, don't panic, we can help. One said it would run me anywhere from five hundred dollars. They warned that the video might be lost since their specialists were
not experts in internal data recovery. Internal data is tricky because it requires the device itself to be functioning in order to get at the memory, so if the device is dead, you can't really get to the data. In other words, Andrews still wasn't any closer to getting his videos back. That's when I got Andrew's email. It was
in March. Jonathan is an entrepreneur and part of his work requires lots of travel, so it took some time to get in touch, but eventually he did agree to help, and over a three months or so of email ping pong, we followed Jonathan through China and sailing across the Atlantic, all these off the grid places all right, And finally in May I got word that Andrew's camera was in
the hands of someone named Taylor Libby. He'd been part of the original flip cam engineering team, and Jonathan said he was doing a more serious intervention on the camera. Taylor is an old college friend of Jonathan's, and after the flip cam unit folded, Taylor worked at Apple for six years. Now, he's a full time dad two kids a little younger than Andrew's son. Jonathan and Taylor still casually stay in touch, so he agreed to help salvage Andrew's videos. So I got these two cameras UM from
John and they both appeared dead or or bricked. UM the same utility as a brick. They can prop us in the door. But Taylor's first challenge was to charge up the battery. When batteries are too depleted, an interesting thing happens. They can kind of get into a catch twenty two spain where they don't they don't even have enough battery available to charge the battery. Taylor plugged the camera into a USB port that measures currents to see
if the slightest tremor could be detected. The recipe there as you would have to charge it for a few minutes and then unplug it, reset it, and then and then charge it again. Taylor did this several times, over charging and resetting, but no dice. It was behaving in a way that didn't look familiar to me, so I kind of was worried about that. One didn't didn't think that camera was going to be salvageable. So what did Tailor, the computer engineer who had helped build the flip cam,
end up doing. Just like the rest of us, He googled it. So I found a video where someone had opened up a camera um similar model, and that kind of gave me a confidence and had can probably open this up without breaking any thing. Taylor dug up a flipcam of his own to practice on, and then cracked into Andrew's device. After moved a couple of boards and got down into where the batteries could see that the
battery was swollen. This is the same thing that happened to those exploiting Samsung batteries a few years back, which were banned from airplanes. A swollen battery can be pretty dangerous, I'm sure. So Taylor switched out that shot battery with a replacement from Amazon. After a few cycles of charges, the flipcam was back online and the memory was intact. So six months later and we could finally bring Andrew
his videos. On a morning in June, I went up the elevator of a nondescript office in the Financial District to meet Andrew for the first time in person. We walked across as open plan office floor to a comfortably furnished meeting room where I set up my computer. How's how's everything going good? Curious? How sorry this took so so long? Hot Journey. Taylor sent us the videos via dropbox. I opened the shared folder and let Andrew kind of
click through immediately. He was looking for something specific, the video of his father in law and his newborn son. Okay, so these were three let's see here, three our files. But thank god, that's Ginger home. That's my apartment on my old apartment on NY six straight at first video show Ginger sitting in a chair holding her swaddled baby boy, just got a hospital personal, Good morning, Simmy, and today's day of life. Three. We haven't done a ton of
recording because we've just been so busy. Love in you, yup um, and you're very cute and you're doing very well, and Ginger is beaming into the camera. You have a visitor though, Okay, we're gonna positive video, sorry for Andrew was on the edge of his seat. He was certain that the visitors they were about to receive were generous parents. Maybe the next file would be the video he was after today your visitors for Arial who sometimes cs by Jessica. The next video of Ginger was a few hours later,
and Dad's best friend Adam and Nana and Papa. But it was filmed after the grandparents had finished their visit. So we had the videos from before and after, but nothing from the visit itself. So where the hell is it? Queen? Before and then the after that was like the one in between is maybe it's somewheres. Andrew spent the next moments clicking through the folder, making sure he hadn't missed a file. He scrutinized the time codes. The two videos
had been filmed eight hours apart. It's so funny. My biggest fear has been that like they got the video off the cameras and there was nothing from the hospital, or it was like video of watching paint drive or whatever. The notion of actually finding the videos from the hospital, but just that one not being there never crossed my mind. After that meeting with Andrew, I asked Taylor if it was possible that the file was lost during the extraction.
It's not impossible that the file, yeah, but it's it's extremely unlikely that Christine's because because one set swapped out the battery, that camera behave flow slee and um, there's no indication of any type of vile corruption or anything else. Taylor did offer one last idea, though, He said that now the camera was running again, we might be able
to see whether the video had accidentally gotten deleted. So let's say you had five videos on there, right, and you deleted one of them, and now it looks like there's four on there. Well, you didn't actually change what's in the memory. All you did was change the table of contents. But this video is still there. We had our doubts about that. How could such an important video just to be accidentally erased? What were the chances that, of all the videos on the camera, that was the
one to vanish? But we had to exhaust all of our options. So I called back that data company with let's call it memorable hold music. So if you stuffer data loss, don't panic. We can help. And I started a new case the Data Recovery Company as a short walk from the office. Um it was Nestla between the luxury boutiques of Fifth Avenue. I went into the glass entryway of an unmarked skyscraper and up twenty or so floors. I, um, I'm here to just drop off that camera. I have
a case number now. I handed over the camera to this receptionist. He was a heavy setman, and he was juggling several ringing phones all the while. So then do I just wait for someone to kind of reach out? Okay? Okay? And how long does that normally take? Okay? Sounds good. Within a week we got our answer. The technician had run multiple scans for residual data on the camera. He did find a fifth file, but it was badly corrupted
and only appeared to be seven seconds long. This might have been seven seconds of Ginger's father or us seven seconds of blank video. Christie, do you do you think it's possible that Andrew made a mistake and there never was a video of his father in law. It's definitely a possibility. Andrew told me in our first conversations together that he and Ginger couldn't remember the exact details of the video, but they did distinctly recall making and watching
the video all those years ago. Christie, this story is so familiar to me. I mean, I myself have so many challenges keeping track of all the photographs and videos of my family across services and technologies and devices and phones. It feels like in the ever increasing advancement of technology, we've lost some stability, Like it's hard to keep the perhaps coint a phrase, you know, good digital hygiene. Things
end up getting spread everywhere. Yeah, I mean I was talking with friends and family about Andrew's situation and it was amazing they all had a similar story. It really is an unintended consequence of deck achnology. I mean, we value the new thing, but then it's really it's hard to go rescue and organize the old things. I was looking for my flip cam videos as we were organizing this story. I couldn't find them. I mean, it was actually lucky that I had posted a few to YouTube.
And it actually does sort of highlight a role that social media can play. Right when we publish videos, they become easier to find. Yeah, but then on on the flip side of that, we are kind of desensitized to ranking the importance of what we post online because we're
so used to posting everything. Yeah, that's true. And there's the same obsolescence challenge, uh, with with apps and online as there is with devices like the flip cam, right, like such a small percentage of apps actually go on to succeed and thrive, and those that do shut down, you know, we end up losing that content that we've
been relying on it to catalog our memories. So now that Andrew has his videos, perhaps not the one that he was looking for, but some of the other ones, uh that chronicle the birth of his first child, do you know is he conducting his digital hygiene differently? Is he backing up and storing them differently? Well? I gave Andrew a call a few days ago. I wanted to ask him just that, how is everything going on your end? Good? Yeah, London down, summer. I know, it's kind of After some
pleasant tries, I cut to the chase. Do you back up your videos? Now? Have you put Have you put the videos that we got for you on another hard drive or whatnot? Yes? Well, I mean they're on a hard drive there on a cloud there, they're in two or three places. You know, a couple of different um places, so that should one get lost again, that we will have it somewhere else in theory and not need to um implore you guys to help us go to the
ends of here. Oh that's good to hear. I'm glad that you've you've taken the ures to his les and learn. And that's it for this week's Decrypted. Thanks for listening. Do you have a story about digital memories lost and found? We want to hear from you. You can email us at Decrypted at Bloomberg dot net or I'm on Twitter at Christy Westgard and I'm at brad Stone. Please subscribe to Decrypted wherever you like to listen, and if you haven't already, leave us a rating in the review. It
helps new listeners find the show. This episode was produced by Pia Godkari and Liz Smith and edited by brad Stone. Thanks also to Aki Itto, Emily Busso and Vandermy Magnus Hendrickson to for Foreheads, and Austin Weinstein. Francesca Levi as head of Bloomberg Podcasts. We'll see you next week.