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Signal Secure Backups

(signal.org)
988 points keyboardJones | 1 comments | 08 Sep 25 16:43 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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nlitsme ◴[08 Sep 25 20:04 UTC] No.45173241[source]▶
This seems to be an unfortunate case where a feature has a misleading name.

You already had secure and encrypted backups on your phone, which you could copy and restore, if you remembered to copy them, and write down a very long password.

The new feature is apparently a way for signal to sell cloud services.

I do think cloud based backups are very useful for less technical people. But it does not really matter if your (properly encrypted) signal backup lives on a google drive/apple cloud, or on a cloud service managed by Signal.

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1. Analemma_ ◴[08 Sep 25 20:07 UTC] No.45173282[source]▶
The encrypted backups do work, but Signal is really, really bad at indicating when and how to make them to use them for restoration. Most non-technical people I know are just resigned to wiping out their Signal history every time they get a new iPhone (and I know two people who abandoned Signal and went back to iMessage because of this), and even I've lost it a couple times.

It leaves sort of a gross taste in my mouth that a paid service is the fix for their unhelpful UX.