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Signal Secure Backups

(signal.org)
988 points keyboardJones | 4 comments | 08 Sep 25 16:43 UTC | HN request time: 0.017s | 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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anilakar ◴[09 Sep 25 05:36 UTC] No.45177800[source]▶
If you restore the backup on a new phone, you'll have to resync all desktop machines, and at least on Windows syncing old messages has never worked for me.
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1. poisonborz ◴[09 Sep 25 08:06 UTC] No.45178963[source]▶
Signal never syncs old messages on secondary clients for security reasons.
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2. privacyking ◴[09 Sep 25 08:29 UTC] No.45179158[source]▶
I don't think that's true anymore. They added message history syncing
3. anilakar ◴[09 Sep 25 09:27 UTC] No.45179636[source]▶
They do. They also offer to do it when you link your desktop client, and like I said, it works on Linux but gives an error message on Windows.

Also, considering that linking requires access to your existing device I don't see an issue with that. Moxie himself considered usability to be more important than tinfoil hat-level crypto because large-scale adoption is what enables security.

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4. AnonC ◴[10 Sep 25 04:50 UTC] No.45193421[source]▶
> They do.

The limitation is that only message history from the past 45 days would be synced. If this has changed recently to allow syncing all message history, I’d be thrilled!