Signal Secure Backups

Yeah, didn't see it mentioned, I trust it will still be available?

I bet they'll phase it out and try to force their worse service, wherein your data is stored on their servers, like they tried to do with PINs. It took enormous pushback to get them to stop mandatory PINs, and even then they made it nagware for a year or two.

I didn't trust their rationale about PINs and remote attestation somehow meaning your data is secured by a small passphrase, just like I won't trust them to not remove a useful and existing feature I already rely on for backups.

Also not mentioned, they designed their existing backup solution to require reverse-engineered community solutions to actually access your data; I have to use a Github project to unencrypt the backup and export my chats, which is something I've never had to do with any other messenger.

While I understand (and share) your criticism, it does sound like they'll continue to support local backups:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45171576

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45172188

From your link, I wish they would answer this, and they've been asked numerous times, and to my knowledge have avoided the question (which is very concerning to me):

>This is excellent news! Will there also be official documentation on the backup format, potentially even official tooling like signalbackup-tools[0] to access/parse backups offline? I'm asking because, having used Signal/TextSecure for 10 years now, my backups are worth a lot to me (obviously) and there have been times when I would have liked to mine & process my backed-up data. (Extract media from conversations in an automated manner, build a more elaborate search, …)

I'm like that poster and backup all my chats obsessively, since way back in the day, and experienced a period with Signal where it was impossible for me to access my own data because of their position.

> I'm like that poster

So you're like me :)

Greyson answered my question btw.