Live data from Hacker News

Signal Secure Backups

signal.org

111–120 of 460 posts

Re: Signal Secure Backups

#111
post #104

I would love to switch over to Signal, but the video call quality pales in comparison to WhatsApp and FaceTime. Add to that issues with even sending pictures or videos on Android, and it's a really hard sell.

> Add to that issues with even sending pictures or videos on Android, and it's a really hard sell.

What issues? The only issue I've seen with Signal and media files, was on iOS, where users aren't able to download them (copy them outside the signal app).

Re: Signal Secure Backups

#112
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

The $1.99/m is not for the up front work of fixing what sucks about current backups though, it's just bundling those fixes in with YACSS (Yet Another Cloud Storage Subscription) is the only way to get people to pay their "reasonable" recurring fee. People here seem to want to answer the question of how to copy data most directly, but only because that's how the problem was phrased. I'm not convinced "users had no way…

Explicitly, from TFA:

> But secure backups aren’t the end of the road. The technology that underpins this initial version of secure backups will also serve as the foundation for more secure backup options in the near future. Our future plans include letting you save a secure backup archive to the location of your choosing, alongside features that let you transfer your encrypted message history between Android, iOS, and Desktop devices.

Re: Signal Secure Backups

#113
> In the past, if you broke or lost your phone, your Signal message history was gone.

this and completly useless multi-device support is the reason I don't use Signal... Telegram is not fully e2ee but it's way more convenient here.

Even XMPP with PGP would be lightyears ahead.

Re: Signal Secure Backups

#114
I have unfortunately lost signal history on various devices. Most recently I lost my iOS history when I restored from a backup without following the right procedure to keep Signal history. I have the full history on my desktop macOS signal though.

Can I use this to restore my macOS signal backup to my iOS phone, so I once again have access to all my old messages on the phone?

Re: Signal Secure Backups

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you read the article? They are working on it.

Where does it say that?

> Our future plans include letting you save a secure backup archive to the location of your choosing, [...]

I also missed this on my first skim of the article though.

Re: Signal Secure Backups

#116
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi there, Signal dev here. The new backup format is indeed cross-platform. I've successfully restored backups on an iPhone, we're just stabilizing things :) If you're curious, the reason that Android's current local backups aren't cross platform is because it was made a long time ago, and it's literally a dump of all the sqlite statements that can be used to recreate Android's sqlite database (encrypted with a strong…

Are there any plans to allow backups to a custom server or another folder?

From tfa:

> But secure backups aren’t the end of the road. The technology that underpins this initial version of secure backups will also serve as the foundation for more secure backup options in the near future. Our future plans include letting you save a secure backup archive to the location of your choosing, alongside features that let you transfer your encrypted message history between Android, iOS, and Desktop devices.

Re: Signal Secure Backups

#117
post #111
post #104

I would love to switch over to Signal, but the video call quality pales in comparison to WhatsApp and FaceTime. Add to that issues with even sending pictures or videos on Android, and it's a really hard sell.

> Add to that issues with even sending pictures or videos on Android, and it's a really hard sell. What issues? The only issue I've seen with Signal and media files, was on iOS, where users aren't able to download them (copy them outside the signal app).

There are a lot of GitHub issues about this (mine being similar to the last one)

https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/10135

https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/13098

https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/11263

https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/14293

Re: Signal Secure Backups

#118
post #104

I would love to switch over to Signal, but the video call quality pales in comparison to WhatsApp and FaceTime. Add to that issues with even sending pictures or videos on Android, and it's a really hard sell.

I agree the video call quality needs improvement, but sending photos and videos has always been flawless on Android for me.

Lucky you! I pretty much can never send videos. I'm guessing it's something format / compression / transcoding related. Pictures are hit or miss; I think it's an infrastructure thing.

Re: Signal Secure Backups

#119
That's great they are doing a paid feature, but I really just want my desktop to back up my phone.

They clearly think people have bad desktop security, and still don't want this to happen. Patronizing...

Edit on

> Our future plans include letting you save a secure backup archive to the location of your choosing, alongside features that let you transfer your encrypted message history between Android, iOS, and Desktop devices.

That's good, but they've said that before. I feel a bit burnt on this.

Re: Signal Secure Backups

#120
post #4

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.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN