Signal Secure Backups

This looks brilliant. I just hope they make it easy to do test restores. In particular, I want to test restore without perturbing my main device. Let me restore using the secret key on a new device.

When I install Signal on a computer it won't show me message history. Will backups allow me to view _all_ my message history on a computer? A big screen is very helpful for browsing lots of messages.

Hi there, Signal dev here. You can sort of do this! You can restore on your new device, and while you will be unregistered on your old device, all of the data is still there. So if you see that something is amiss on the new device, you could re-register on your old device and you'd be right back where you started. This is actually one of the ways we test the feature with our own personal data.

Hey, i have a related question about this:

I have an old iPhone that has all my old Signal messages still on it that I wasnt able to move with me when I switched to Android. Is there any way that I can use these new tools to move the old conversations on my iPhone over to my android phone without losing all the new messages that are on my android now?

That is, I want to merge the two histories.