Not the bad photos, not the angry draft, not the texts. Especially not once a dispute starts.
The instinct to tidy up is strong and it is a trap.
Once you are in a dispute — or once you can reasonably see one coming — stop deleting things. Not the blurry photos. Not the voicemail. Not the text thread where you were angry. Not the app that has your service history in it.
Courts and reviewers take the destruction of relevant records very seriously, and the reaction is often out of proportion to what was destroyed. The reasoning is simple: if you got rid of it, the assumption available to everyone is that it would have hurt you.
That assumption can end up costing more than the actual content of whatever you deleted. A bad fact you kept is survivable. A missing thing you deleted is sometimes not.
You do not need to know the legal term for this. You need the habit: once a dispute exists, nothing goes away.
Check that last one today. Automatic deletion is still deletion, and "my email did it on its own" is a bad position to be in.
Turn off auto-delete in mail, messages, and anything else that prunes itself.
Back up the whole thing, once, now. Not the good bits — everything. Phone to computer, computer to a second place. Do not curate. Curating later is easy; recovering later is not.
Keep originals separate from working copies. One folder you never touch, one folder you work in. If you crop or annotate, do it to a copy.
Download from portals before anything closes. Insurer portals, service records, contractor apps. Those disappear when accounts lapse, and they are not yours to get back.
Do not "clean up" the file before showing a lawyer. They would much rather see everything, including the parts you are embarrassed by. Removing them is the one thing that can genuinely damage your position, and lawyers are unbothered by messy — they are bothered by gaps.
Keep it. Do not send it, but keep it.
If you are worried about it being read one day: the fact that you wrote something angry and did not send it is not the problem you think it is. Deleting it, in a dispute, is a worse fact than having written it.
Tidy later. Right now, keep everything, back it up once, and turn off anything that deletes on its own.