at least on android: you use a good old usb-c cable
Signal Secure Backups
351–360 of 460 posts
Re: Signal Secure Backups
#352[dead]
Re: Signal Secure Backups
#353FTA: “This is the first time we’ve offered a paid feature. The reason we’re doing this is simple: media requires a lot of storage, and storing and transferring large amounts of data is expensive”
Those costs are for doing backups to their servers. If this supported making encrypted backups to Google drive/OneDrive/iCloud/etc, they wouldn’t have those costs, and, AFAICT, that would not be less secure, given (also FTA):
“At the core of secure backups is a 64-character recovery key that is generated on your device. This key is yours and yours alone; it is never shared with Signal’s servers. Your recovery key is the only way to “unlock” your backup when you need to restore access to your messages. Losing it means losing access to your backup permanently, and Signal cannot help you recover it.”
⇒ I think it’s more of “we were looking for a new revenue stream, and picked this as a way to get that”
There’s nothing wrong with that, but presenting it as “to get secure backups, we have to make costs” is disingenuous.
Re: Signal Secure Backups
#354Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Especially after SyncThing disappeared from Play Store (because it was basically a non-Android app behind a thin Android shell that couldn't easily be upgraded to more modern native APIs), there's nothing super-obvious here. That's not what happened, it was Google who started rejecting their updates on Play store. I believe the original Android app maintainer quit after that but there's a fork on on F-droid which w…
fork that will work perfectly until year after next.
Not if you run the GrapheneOS variant of Android.
Re: Signal Secure Backups
#355Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps they will? > Our future plans include letting you save a secure backup archive to the location of your choosing
A backup option has been missing for years. Future plans on this particular topic seem to take forever.
I built a micro-journaling app back in the day and wanted it to be highly secure. Backups seemed to be one of the most vulnerable surfaces for that. I imagine their delay might have been a combination of a technological and ideological worries, as that's what I experienced.
Re: Signal Secure Backups
#356Personally I've never understood the need some have for keeping chat histories. So this isn't a feature I'll use, but am sure others will. And remember, Signal is a nonprofit. If you use it, and if you can, you should be donating.
Same.
Just save the pictures in the camera roll and important messages in your notes app of choice.
Re: Signal Secure Backups
#357I think the option to pay for more than 45 days backup is a smart way to get some cash. Kudos Signal for this.
Re: Signal Secure Backups
#358A subscription. So the money squeeze starts.
Re: Signal Secure Backups
#359Earlier 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…
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 (ob…
They are indeed incremental, and smaller than the current monolithic backups that Signal currently creates. [0] Yay!
Re: Signal Secure Backups
#360A subscription. So the money squeeze starts.
What's your alternative?
Keep doing voluntary donations and wait for rich people to throw 50mil at it again?