Uploading with a weak or dropped signal
Surveillance work happens in parking garages, rural roads and parked cars — exactly where signal is worst. Here is plainly what MyCaseViewer does about that, and what it does not: it survives a dropped connection without losing what you've already sent, and it can hold files you pick while you have no connection at all, so long as you keep the page open until they finish sending.
Install MyCaseViewer on your phone
This gets you a home-screen icon and a full-screen app rather than a browser tab with an address bar — faster to open one-handed between setups, and it looks like the app it is. It does not change how uploads handle a dropped connection; that part works the same whether you install it or just use the site in your browser. Install it for the convenience, not because it changes what happens when signal drops.
iPhone (Safari)
- Open mycaseviewer.com and sign in.
- Tap the Share button (the square with an arrow pointing up).
- Scroll down and tap Add to Home Screen.
Android (Chrome)
- Open mycaseviewer.com and sign in.
- Tap the menu (three dots, top right).
- Tap Install app (or Add to Home screen).
What actually happens when your connection drops
It depends entirely on how long the drop lasts.
A few seconds — driving under an overpass, a bar of signal
Handled automatically. A large upload is sent in chunks, and each chunk retries on its own — up to three attempts, with a short pause between them — before anything is reported as failed. If your connection comes back within a few seconds, you likely never see anything happen at all.
Longer than that, or you close the app
The upload stops, and you'll see it as unfinished — but nothing already sent is lost. MyCaseViewer keeps a small reminder on your device (not the file itself) so it can recognize the upload again, for about a day. Reopen the case once you have a connection and an Unfinished uploads panel offers to pick it back up.
No signal at all when you pick the file
It waits. Choose the file and it sits in the case with Waiting for connection next to it — nothing is sent yet, because there is nothing to send it to. The moment your phone gets a connection back, it starts on its own; you don't need to do anything or re-pick it. Keep the case open until it does — see what this does not do for exactly what happens if you don't.
Resuming picks up exactly where it stopped. A 3 GB video that reached 80% before your signal died does not start over — it sends the remaining ~600 MB. What counts as “already sent” is confirmed against our storage provider each time, not trusted from anything remembered on your phone, so a crashed app or a dead battery can't corrupt the file it produces.
What this does not do
It needs the page open. The queue lives in your browser tab, not on your phone in the background — there is no way around that on an iPhone, since Safari has never supported the browser API (Background Sync) that would let a site upload with the app fully closed. Android Chrome has broader support for it, but MyCaseViewer doesn't rely on it either, so the behavior is the same on both: keep MyCaseViewer open (it can sit in the background behind another app on your phone) until what you queued has actually gone through.
A file that never started can be lost. Once an upload has begun, it survives a dropped connection — that is the resume behavior above. A file that was only ever queued, waiting for a first connection, exists solely in that browser tab. Close the tab, reload the page, or let your phone kill it in the background before you're back in range, and it's gone — there is no server record of it yet to resume from. MyCaseViewer tells you when this happened rather than leaving an empty queue with no explanation, but it can't get the file back; you'll need to add it again.
Plan around both the way you'd plan around any tool that needs a live connection to talk to the internet: if a file can't wait, get it queued before you head somewhere with no signal at all, and don't force-close the app while something is still waiting to send.