I Couldn't Find It, So I Built It: A Dad's Story
By Szabolcs Ujfalussy
It started as a backup problem, which is the kind of problem I know how to solve.
By the time our second son, Levi, was born in 2021, I had been filming our family for years. The cluttered spare room turning into a nursery before Zéti arrived. The early-morning drive to the hospital. The first time we carried him through our front door. The lockdown months when it was just the three of us learning a strange new world. Then a fourth person, and all of it again. Thousands of photos, hours of video, sorted, labeled, dated.
Like most dads I know, I took the job of family archivist seriously, mostly because I have so little of my own childhood to look back on: a shoebox of bent photographs, some undated, a few with faces nobody in the family can name anymore. I wanted my sons to have more than fragments.
So I did what a careful person does. I built a backup system. Copies in more than one place, protected against a dead hard drive, a fire, a break-in. For a while that felt like the finish line.
Then one evening a different question walked in and sat down. What if nothing happens to the files, but something happens to me?
The collection could be perfectly safe, backed up three times over, and still never reach the two people it was made for. They might not know where to look. They might not know it existed. They would be, at best, two boys with a drive full of folders named by date and nobody left to explain what any of it meant.
I had protected the memories from being lost. I had done nothing to make sure they would be handed over.
I want to be honest: I did not sit down and decide to start a company. I sat down and tried to solve a problem for one family. The practical side was the easy part. The hard part was the question underneath it: how do you build something that acts when it should and, far more importantly, never acts when it shouldn't? A missed notification can't be enough. A broken phone can't be enough. A week offline on a holiday certainly can't be enough. Whatever I built had to be patient and careful to the point of stubbornness, because being wrong in one direction means a message arriving fifty years early.
I spent weeks, then months, with notebooks. Flowcharts. Sketches of screens. Kriszti, my wife, got used to finding me at the kitchen table after the boys were asleep, drawing boxes and arrows. She has been patient with this project in ways I will not be able to repay. Slowly the thing took shape: repeated check-ins, a trusted person who is asked to confirm before anything moves, a final waiting period on top of that. Layers, because one layer is never enough.
Somewhere in those months the idea grew past photos. If I was going to make sure the archive reached my sons, why not the things I actually wanted to say to them? Who I was at the age they are now. What I see in each of them that they can't see yet. A thank-you for Kriszti that I keep meaning to say out loud. So letters came in, and voice, and video, each in its own private place for the one person it is meant for.
And then I did the thing I'm half embarrassed to admit: I decided that if I was going to do this, I would do it properly, for other parents too. The next two years were a crash course in everything a dad with a spreadsheet does not know: encryption, payments, mobile apps, and Apple's review process, which taught me forms of patience I did not know existed. The long version of the story is at myangelvault.com/our-story, if you're curious.
Here is the part that matters, though, and it has nothing to do with software. The first message I ever put into it was for Zéti. It was short. I rewrote it twice, and when I finally saved it I noticed my hands were not quite steady. Nothing had changed in our house. The boys were asleep; the backups were still running. But for the first time, something I had made for them was pointed at them, with their names on it, instead of sitting in a folder called 2019.
I still hope I will be the one to hand all of this over, in person, at exactly the right moment. But if life takes a turn, I know it will not stay hidden. That is the whole product, really. It began as a backup problem. It turned out to be a dad problem, and it's the only one I have ever been glad I couldn't stop thinking about.