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Signal Secure Backups

(signal.org)
988 points keyboardJones | 5 comments | 08 Sep 25 16:43 UTC | HN request time: 0.208s | source
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poisonborz ◴[08 Sep 25 17:34 UTC] No.45171210[source]▶
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

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Sesse__ ◴[08 Sep 25 17:46 UTC] No.45171393[source]▶
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.

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UltraSane ◴[08 Sep 25 21:35 UTC] No.45174322[source]▶
USB transfer is by far the best way to transfer large amounts of data to and from phones.
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1. codethief ◴[08 Sep 25 22:49 UTC] No.45175135[source]▶
Really? Ever since Android devices ceased to be regular USB storage devices and switched to MTP, this has never worked well for me. MTP is incredibly slow.
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2. UltraSane ◴[08 Sep 25 23:58 UTC] No.45175705[source]▶
What method do you find to be faster?
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3. kzshantonu ◴[09 Sep 25 01:22 UTC] No.45176287[source]▶
Copyparty running in termux serving over USB tethering
4. codethief ◴[09 Sep 25 02:08 UTC] No.45176594[source]▶
Pretty much any other: Connecting my phone to my computer as USB storage (when it was still possible), connecting a thumb drive to my phone, syncing files using Syncthing, using adb, …
5. roywiggins ◴[09 Sep 25 02:19 UTC] No.45176648[source]▶
MTP is so slow that when I have enough photos and videos on my phone, Windows will crap itself and stall out just trying to list the folder. It's functionally unusable and I don't know how I'd get those files off the phone if I didn't use literally anything else. If it was mass storage I could just rsync it over USB but it isn't so I can't.

I ended up using rclone on Windows with an rsync server running on the phone, I think sshd4a usually.