The file is encrypted with the passcode and the database can be extracted.
1. It is non-incremental. This means you'll need about as much free space on your phone as your Signal database takes, and it may take many hours to make if your database is large (mine is 18GB). I used to wake up to find my phone had not even fully charged because it had been so busy writing Signal backups.
2. Once you have it on disk, how do you get it away from your phone? Especially after SyncThing disappeared from Play Store (because it was basically a non-Android app behind a thin Android shell that couldn't easily be upgraded to more modern native APIs), there's nothing super-obvious here.
I would have loved a better solution for local backups, but realistically, $2/month for cloud backup is really cheap, and a pragmatic solution.
People here seem to want to answer the question of how to copy data most directly, but only because that's how the problem was phrased. I'm not convinced "users had no way to sync data on their phone" was/is a real problem worth paying for YACSS for in the first place.
It may seem obvious now, but I know most people will forget and be puzzled if their phone suffers physical damage. A lot about this has mandatory manual steps.
On Android? Easy, Termux app and then rsync to my Desktop/Laptop. Or via Solid Explorer. Or E-Mail via Blitzmail.
Non incremental is a suboptimal design decision, backups should be incremental, e.g. monthly if automated or with from-to dates.
That's not what happened, it was Google who started rejecting their updates on Play store. I believe the original Android app maintainer quit after that but there's a fork on on F-droid which works perfectly.
> But secure backups aren’t the end of the road. The technology that underpins this initial version of secure backups will also serve as the foundation for more secure backup options in the near future. Our future plans include letting you save a secure backup archive to the location of your choosing, alongside features that let you transfer your encrypted message history between Android, iOS, and Desktop devices.
> Once you have it on disk, how do you get it away from your phone?
Unfortunately this doesn't work on iPhone. I have a shortcut that will do something similar that I can share but that is a lot hackier...
[0] https://github.com/stevenwalton/.dotfiles/blob/master/script...
[1] Probably better. I'm normally logged into my alt account
But I wouldn't use that for backups, I'd use rsync.
Yes, there are some people who will forget to do that, or just lose the restore key, but that's the security/usability trade off.
The bigger issue for third party apps will be things like Newpipe, where applying for a key will put the developers in danger of a lawsuit because it affects Google's business.
(The APK signing requirement is a fiasco, I'm not defending Google. Just pointing out that this app will probably not be as seriously impacted as others).
Ever thought about that?
>
> 1. It is non-incremental.
I wonder if that's differently with the newly announced functionality. Their announcement doesn't sound like it:
> Once you’ve enabled secure backups, your device will automatically create a fresh secure backup archive every day, replacing the previous day’s archive.
This is not trivial when each backup archive is in the order of 20 GB.
I recently vibe-coded a crappy Windows Go GUI to grab files off my phone via rclone & sshd4a and then optionally delete them, but it's a very manual process since sshd4a has to be running on the phone before I initiate the pull.
I ended up using rclone on Windows with an rsync server running on the phone, I think sshd4a usually.
It's entire purpose is "make two folders identical".
It's very good at that: so good that I frequently wish it did other things - i.e. if it had some notion of minimum seeding levels so it would destage files off a device provided they were replicated elsewhere (e.g. automatically clearing old photos off your phone would be a good use of it).
https://privsec.dev/posts/android/banking-applications-compa...