Signal Secure Backups

Backing up Signal on Android for free and offline was ~always possible. The app creates a multi GB backup file on the phone memory under the Signal folder that you can just copy out and back on a new phone.

The file is encrypted with the passcode and the database can be extracted.

https://github.com/bepaald/signalbackup-tools

There are a couple of problems with the existing backup:

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.

> Once you have it on disk, how do you get it away from your phone?

adb pull no worky? At least for HN readers.

Any backup that needs manual intervention is no backup.

Even automatic backups run at intervals to cause less server load. The article says you absolutely have to write down your restore key too (They say notebook or PW manager).

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.