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988 points keyboardJones | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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derefr ◴[] No.45172321[source]
@Signal devs: any reason that the only two options for backup are now "locally" (flexible, but only solves for some use-cases) or "to Signal's special servers" (not flexible; might be legally impossible for many users to enable)?

Because it seems to me that, for much of Signal's (often paranoid) audience, they'd much rather use one of the backup/sync providers they've already verified trust of, than have to additionally trust some new backup service provider.

And it also seems to me that, now that Signal has the architecture to support this, it'd be pretty easy to add additional backup-sync providers.

E.g. in the codebase for the iOS Signal client, you could implement a provider that does incremental backup sync against iCloud (i.e. CloudKit for messages + iCloud Drive for attachments) — allowing the user to use their (perhaps already paid-tier) iCloud account storage.

Same with Android and Google Drive (though Google Drive doesn't have an equivalent to CloudKit, so this might be fiddly; to get good amortized write costs, you might have to e.g. buffer row-like writes in a local replication journal, and then flush them through bulk local key inserts in a locally-partial-fetch-cached set of LevelDB files, where the updated files in the set then get flushed as single whole-file overwrites to GDrive.)

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Note that in all cases, Signal could/should still fully encrypt this data before pushing it to the provider; the backup wouldn't be expected to be "legible" to the user.

But where, with backups synced to Signal's servers, users need to trust that Signal's E2E backups encryption works perfectly to be able to believe that Signal themselves can't then have access to your backed-up data; it's much less scary to sync to literally any other provider, who won't specifically know that they've got chat data on their hands / won't have any potential to (perhaps after a bad acquisition by a PE firm) begin thinking of themselves as a "data company" who would love to have "chat data" as an asset.

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nar001 ◴[] No.45174318[source]
I'm confused, what's stopping you from using one of the backup services you already have on the file after it's done? Since Signal would backup to a file in your phone? Couldn't you just point your service to it and automatically sync every day for example?
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daveoc64 ◴[] No.45174953[source]
The existing backup feature on Android doesn't do an incremental backup.

I just ran a backup, and it was 850MB. So having my phone upload something of that size every day would be a bit annoying.

Most of the major cloud storage platforms don't offer sync on Android.

It's not really a good fit for how the filesystem is used by Android apps.

I currently only do a Signal backup every few months (when I remember), and manually upload it to OneDrive.

I'm not going to pay for their new service - I already pay for too many storage services.

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styanax ◴[] No.45180117[source]
> I just ran a backup, and it was 850MB. So having my phone upload something of that size every day would be a bit annoying

It may be inconvenient but this can be solved by using the features in the app to review your storage and save those thousands of images/audio/file sequestered inside the app out to the filesystem, then delete them from the app. You're not backing up "chats" you're backing up your image library being stored inside a chat app.

(yes I get the argument that you need to store them "in context" so save those and do the rest. there's no way 100% of that 850MB is "must have saved inside the app in chats" data, I'll bet $10 USD on it)

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1. daveoc64 ◴[] No.45180447[source]
Reducing the size of the backup would solve one problem, but it's really the lack of automation of the process that's the annoying part.
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2. styanax ◴[] No.45181011[source]
We're partially there, under Storage is an option allowing you to set how long to keep messages and I've set mine to one year. Possible: forever (default), 1y, 6mo, 30d - and it works, my old chat messages (not the whole chat, just individuals) are properly culled over time.

Edit: in context, Google Messages has none of these features and I have friends still married to Google Voice who send me tons of pics. Culling SMS requires using a third party tool to export and re-import etc. leagues behind Signal. None of it's backed up without the same third party tools as well and no built in image management.