Real answers to the questions people actually ask.
On your phone, filed by customer. Open a customer's job file to see their before/after pairs, videos, documents, and equipment plates, or open the Vault to scroll everything you've ever captured, newest first. Captures are stored inside Hardstamp, not in your camera roll — that keeps your stamped evidence separate from personal photos and keeps the burned-in stamp intact.
Every capture is stamped with the time, the filed job address, and the GPS location your device measured — burned directly into the pixels, not laid over them. When you're online the time is network-verified and, on video, it ticks forward second by second with the footage. When you're offline, the stamp honestly reads TIME SOURCE: DEVICE (OFFLINE) instead of claiming a verified time.
LOCATION OFF means location permission was off or a GPS fix wasn't available when you captured — the photo is still saved, just without coordinates. DEVICE (OFFLINE) means your phone couldn't reach the clock server, so the time comes from the device instead of being network-verified. Both are honest labels, on purpose: Hardstamp never dresses up device time as verified time.
Open a job and tap to build a PDF report — it lays out the stamped before/after photos, video poster frames, documents, and equipment records. You can also attach the full video files to the share. Sharing uses your phone's normal share sheet (email, Messages, AirDrop, Files); nothing is uploaded to Hardstamp.
Open any capture in the full-screen viewer and tap the trash button, or delete a whole customer from the Edit customer screen (it also removes that customer's jobs, photos, videos, documents, and signatures). Deleted items go to Recently Deleted — a row at the bottom of the Vault — where they stay for 30 days with a days-remaining count. From there you can Restore anything, Delete now to remove it immediately, or Empty everything. After 30 days an item is permanently deleted on its own — the record and its files are removed from your device.
Your data lives on your device, so deleting the app deletes all of it. There is no copy on our servers to restore from — we don't have servers. If you turned on iCloud backup, your dated snapshots are in your own iCloud and you can restore from them after reinstalling.
It's off by default. Turn on iCloud backup in Settings and Hardstamp writes a dated snapshot of your job files to your own iCloud — never to us, because there is no Hardstamp server. It uses your iCloud storage.
Every photo and video is backed up as a compressed stamped copy (around 400 KB) so a restore always gives you readable, stamped evidence without filling your iCloud. If you want the originals too, switch on Include full-size photos & videos — that uploads the full-resolution files and video, and only over Wi-Fi. Deleted items are not backed up. After the first backup, it runs itself at most once a day in the background.
Settings › Restore from iCloud…. You'll see your backups listed by date. Open one and it's grouped by customer, so you can bring back everything, a single customer, or individual photos.
Restoring merges — it never overwrites what's already on your phone. Anything already there is left alone; if a photo's file went missing, the file is put back. A photo that came back from the compressed copy is labelled RESTORED COPY when you open it, so you always know whether you're looking at the original or the backup copy.
This is a backup, not a sync — Hardstamp doesn't mirror your phone or move data between devices on its own.
The backup stops and the app shows a red banner telling you how many items didn't get backed up, with a button to go and free up space. Apple doesn't let an app check how much iCloud space you have left, so Hardstamp tells you the moment it actually runs out rather than guessing. Once you've freed up space, the next backup finishes the job and the banner clears.
Email us and we'll help.