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Signal Secure Backups

signal.org

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261–270 of 460 posts

Re: Signal Secure Backups

#261

Post by dmitrygr »

This is overcomplicated to collect money IMHO. All modern OSs can happily backup app files. It is a well-solved problem. If you find this backup method not secure enough (as Signal authors do), fine, encrypt the backup with a special key, exactly as described in TFA, and leave the resulting archive in a location for my chosen phone OS to back it up as it would. All the goals are accomplished, and without charging me money or limiting how many days of media are stored.

Do not get me wrong. Signal is great software and i'd gladly pay for it. Honestly. But not via this underhanded nonsensical way

Re: Signal Secure Backups

#262

Post by codethief »

eigenspace wrote: post #256
greysonp wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Using the new backup feature that we're discussing here (once it is available on iOS), you will probably need to transfer your old iPhone's data to an Android device first (either a secondary one or your current one, provided you have backed up its data to a backup file). Then follow https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45174779 .

Re: Signal Secure Backups

#263

Post by sneak »

Why do people want logs of conversations for years and years?

All of my Signal chats are set to 4 week expiry. Any media I want to keep, I save to the device.

I don’t audio record my conversations with close friends and family; why would I keep chat logs?

I don’t understand why people demand this feature. It wasn’t until the iPhone that people got accustomed to keeping every text for all time.

I don’t think it’s a healthy approach. For most of human history, you didn’t get a permanent record of private conversations you had with people. It feels like a type of hoarding, given how often people actually use/access their old (>4 weeks) chat logs.

Re: Signal Secure Backups

#264

Post by daveoc64 »

nar001 wrote: post #238
derefr wrote: post #128

@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 addition…

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?

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.

Re: Signal Secure Backups

#265

Post by sneak »

joshjob42 wrote: post #98
cherryteastain wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not Signal's fault that Apple does not let you access the most basic feature of an operating system - the filesystem.

They do and have done for years now. There’s been a files app since 2017. They’ve had Advanced Data Protection available for iOS backups since 2022. Signal has just been lazy and found maintaining the Android backups to be a pain, so they refused to implement it for iOS.

ADP is off by default (this is why iMessage isn’t really e2ee), and importantly, isn’t available in all countries.

I believe in the UK you are legally barred from having access to iCloud ADP.

Re: Signal Secure Backups

#266

Post by daveoc64 »

sneak wrote: post #260

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…

Have you changed the image quality settings in the app to "High" - I see no mention of that in your blog post.

Re: Signal Secure Backups

#267

Post by codethief »

greysonp wrote: post #59
amluto wrote: post #8

Wow, maybe as a side effect users will be able to migrate between Android and iOS without losing their message history. Seriously, why is the migration protocol completely different on the two platforms?

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…

Hi Greyson!

> But this new thing is all cross-platform, and in the near future we'll even be making our local backups cross-platform.

This is excellent news! Will there also be official documentation on the backup format, potentially even official tooling like signalbackup-tools[0] to access/parse backups offline? I'm asking because, having used Signal/TextSecure for 10 years now, my backups are worth a lot to me (obviously) and there have been times when I would have liked to mine & process my backed-up data. (Extract media from conversations in an automated manner, build a more elaborate search, …)

My backups have also reached the point where they are so big (15-20 GB) that it's starting to become difficult to conduct a backup each day and sync it successfully before it gets overridden 48h later. So unless I start using the new "cloud backup" feature[1] (which I'm not sure I want to), at some point I will have to archive my existing Signal conversations somewhere and start from scratch (i.e. reset the app). In that case, it would be nice if there was an officially documented way to merge & read new and old backups offline (on my desktop), similar to what [0] provides right now.

[0]: https://github.com/bepaald/signalbackup-tools

[1]: EDIT: Actually, it seems like the new cloud backup feature doesn't support incremental backups, either? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45175387

Re: Signal Secure Backups

#268

Post by sneak »

daveoc64 wrote: post #266
sneak wrote: post #260

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…

Have you changed the image quality settings in the app to "High" - I see no mention of that in your blog post.

Yes, though IIRC the setting didn’t exist until after I wrote that blog post.

Even “High” is still total shit. I frequently contemplate hacking the client app and recompiling it to remove image recompression entirely.

Re: Signal Secure Backups

#269

Post by palata »

derefr wrote: post #128

@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 addition…

Did you read the article?

Re: Signal Secure Backups

#270

Post by palata »

kelnos wrote: post #174

I don't get this. The local-only backup option is already encrypted. Why can't they include an option for me to upload it somewhere of my choosing, like Google Drive, or even using Android's built-in backup system, so I can do it for free (my current backup file is well over a GB)? I already donate $5/mo to Signal Foundation; building a paid-only backup solution gives me a bad taste. I even wrote a small Android app…

Kind of answered by a Signal dev here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45171576

The existing local-only option is legacy. I guess they haven't built on top of it because of that. The new option is better, and they say in the article that it should offer an option to do exactly what you ask for.

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