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.

> 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.

That's not what happened, it was Google who started rejecting their updates on Play store. I believe the original Android app maintainer quit after that but there's a fork on on F-droid which works perfectly.

fork that will work perfectly until year after next.

Why?

Presumably they're referring to Google's plans to roll out developer signing requirements for all apps[1], which will affect F-Droid-installed apps.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45017028