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Signal Secure Backups

signal.org

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Re: Signal Secure Backups

#251

Post by swores »

greysonp wrote: post #204
swores wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well if somebody has a year of messages backed up on Signal's servers (with this new feature), and one of their linked devices gets turned on after two months of being turned off, they could surely pull the messages from the backup rather than from the normal queue but do it seemlessly so that from a user point of view the device just never got unlinked? Without backups it makes sense to have a limit, like you said (…

Hi there, Signal dev here. While we won't do this for you automatically, any time you link a new secondary device, we give the user the option to transfer their message history. It follows the same rules as backups: last 45 days of media for free, or all of it if you're a paid user. And even if you're not a paid user, you can request individual attachments be transferred from your primary device. One caveat is that w…

Thanks for the reply - I definitely hope you can someday get to the point where, using the backups, you can get rid of the 30 day limit for having a device online, such that the user experience is identical whether turning on a device for the first time in 29 days or the first time in 99 days - the only difference being the backend tech of where the messages are loaded from, which the user wouldn't need to know about. Or, if needed, the user getting a "this device has been offline for X days, please enter your backup password to sync all previous messages" alert.

Re: Signal Secure Backups

#252

Post by arccy »

greysonp wrote: post #204
swores wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well if somebody has a year of messages backed up on Signal's servers (with this new feature), and one of their linked devices gets turned on after two months of being turned off, they could surely pull the messages from the backup rather than from the normal queue but do it seemlessly so that from a user point of view the device just never got unlinked? Without backups it makes sense to have a limit, like you said (…

Hi there, Signal dev here. While we won't do this for you automatically, any time you link a new secondary device, we give the user the option to transfer their message history. It follows the same rules as backups: last 45 days of media for free, or all of it if you're a paid user. And even if you're not a paid user, you can request individual attachments be transferred from your primary device. One caveat is that w…

There should really be a prompt/hint when re-linking to tell you about this caveat, I was looking at the blog post from the beginning of the year and wondering how come a feature isn't available after ~8 months.

Re: Signal Secure Backups

#253

Post by elevation »

I moved phones before Signal backups were available. My old phone has years of Signal chat and photo history. I can scroll through the conversations, but since I activated Signal on my new phone, my old phone will not let me export a backup any longer. Is there a safe sequence of operations to let me recover the data?

Re: Signal Secure Backups

#254

Post by arccy »

IshKebab wrote: post #93

> Losing it means losing access to your backup permanently, and Signal cannot help you recover it. Oof... That's going to be tough to explain to normal users. "Sorry you've been paying for backups all this time, but you should have written down this code that you will only ever use once somewhere safe and remembered where it is. All your data is gone." Not the right security trade-off for most people.

when you're shown the code, it has 2 buttons: copy to clipboard and save to password manager. if you choose password manager you should be relatively safe...

Re: Signal Secure Backups

#255

Post by oezi »

Nathan2055 wrote: post #161
oezi wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Will the new backup format support also conversion of filetypes between Android and iOS? In the past Voice Memos from Android couldn't be opened on iOS if they weren't sent directly between participants.

That's really surprising to me. iOS has had pretty decent audio format support for a few years now: even though you can't directly import FLAC files to iTunes/Music, they are supported in the OS itself since 2017 and play fine both in Files and in Safari. The other big mainstream formats (WAV, AIFF, MP3, AAC, and ALAC) have been supported for years, and even Opus finally got picked up in 2021. About the only non-nich…

The issue is OGG with Opus (for me) which was used by WhatsApp but isn't natively supported under iOS.

https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-iOS/issues/4539

Re: Signal Secure Backups

#256

Post by eigenspace »

greysonp wrote: post #67
akkartik wrote: 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.

Hey, i have a related question about this:

I have an old iPhone that has all my old Signal messages still on it that I wasnt able to move with me when I switched to Android. Is there any way that I can use these new tools to move the old conversations on my iPhone over to my android phone without losing all the new messages that are on my android now?

That is, I want to merge the two histories.

Re: Signal Secure Backups

#258

Post by codethief »

elevation wrote: post #253

I moved phones before Signal backups were available. My old phone has years of Signal chat and photo history. I can scroll through the conversations, but since I activated Signal on my new phone, my old phone will not let me export a backup any longer. Is there a safe sequence of operations to let me recover the data?

Couldn't you re-register your old phone temporarily, just for the purpose of taking the backup¹, and later re-register your current phone? (In fact, once your old phone is registered, turn on airplane mode, and you should be able to re-register your current phone right away without affecting your old phone and the backup you're making there.)

Alternatively, would it be an option to get a throwaway number you could register your old phone under?

Finally, once you have the backup, use something like https://github.com/bepaald/signalbackup-tools to merge your old phone's backup with your current phone's backup, and then reinstall Signal on your current phone from that merged backup. (Disclaimer: I have never actually done this before but signalbackup-tools has been around for a long time and the developer seems to be very responsive.)

¹) I'm talking about the traditional way of backing up Signal conversation data to an encrypted archive here, not the feature discussed in the OP.

Re: Signal Secure Backups

#259

Post by sudahtigabulan »

tkel wrote: post #22
rogerkirkness wrote: post #2

The main way I specialize messages at this point is basically 'Am I going to want this later'? If the answer is yes, I use email. If not I use Signal. It's interesting this was the most requested feature... it wouldn't be for me even though I love Signal.

It's important for Signal groups, because on a new device without a backup the groups you were in don't show up until someone sends a message in the group. Say if you were the only admin in an announcement-only group, no one else can send a message in the group, so that group is now lost to you.

The contact list on a linked desktop client will show all groups you're in, even though your main device doesn't.

On Android, if you know the group's name, you can search in the contact list, and the group will "magically" show up, even though it wasn't in the list.

Not the greatest UX.

Re: Signal Secure Backups

#260

Post by sneak »

If Signal is offering pay-for-media-storage, it would be nice to be able to pay to send full-resolution media. I’m a photographer and every image sent via Signal that isn’t zipped first is TOTALLY DESTROYED by silent recompression.

https://sneak.berlin/20210425/signal-is-wrecking-your-images...

Also, the donation spam in Signal doesn’t let me donate Mobilecoin from the wallet right inside Signal. What’s the point of having a payments feature if I can’t use it to pay you?

Please allow payments to Signal to be done in Signal’s native payment system.

I would love to subscribe to Signal in a privacy-preserving way.

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