Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Signal Secure Backups

signal.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–370 of 460 posts

Re: Signal Secure Backups

#361

Post by poisonborz »

anilakar wrote: post #340
poisonborz wrote: post #39

Backing up Signal on Android for free and offline was ~always possible. The app creates a multi GB backup file on the phone memory under the Signal folder that you can just copy out and back on a new phone. The file is encrypted with the passcode and the database can be extracted. https://github.com/bepaald/signalbackup-tools

If you restore the backup on a new phone, you'll have to resync all desktop machines, and at least on Windows syncing old messages has never worked for me.

Signal never syncs old messages on secondary clients for security reasons.

Re: Signal Secure Backups

#362

Post by neobrain »

Someone wrote: post #353

FTA: “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)…

> ⇒ I think it’s more of “we were looking for a new revenue stream, and picked this as a way to get that”

This seems highly implausible given the 2 USD/mo pricing, the existence of a free storage plan, and the non-negligible operating costs that obviously do exist.

I'd be interested if you have data that supports the idea of the economics working out though.

Re: Signal Secure Backups

#363

Post by Tepix »

john01dav wrote: post #225

They need to add some free way to backup to my own server. I have my own raid array with backups sitting in my basement. I'll back up to that. I do not want to pay them for cloud storage. Right now, theoretically, I can do this by backing up to my phone and then copying the file over. But, this has many issues. Firstly, it is manual, so it will happen way less. Secondly, it is not differential, so the storage require…

I agree.

> Right now, theoretically, I can do this by backing up to my phone

You don't have this option on iOS right now.

Re: Signal Secure Backups

#364

Post by privacyking »

poisonborz wrote: post #361
anilakar wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you restore the backup on a new phone, you'll have to resync all desktop machines, and at least on Windows syncing old messages has never worked for me.

Signal never syncs old messages on secondary clients for security reasons.

I don't think that's true anymore. They added message history syncing

Re: Signal Secure Backups

#365

Post by privacyking »

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…

Do you know roughly how long before the iOS version comes out? I want to switch to iOS from android.

Re: Signal Secure Backups

#366

Post by littlestymaar »

nikeee wrote: post #212

> alongside features that let you transfer your encrypted message history between Android, iOS, and Desktop devices. That's actually the feature I've been looking forward to. As I moved vom Android to iOS, I lost _all_ message histories from all messenger apps that use E2EE (Signal, WhatsApp, Threema, etc). The only one that "just worked" was Telegram due to not being encrypted. WhatsApp had a migration app that has…

> WhatsApp had a migration app that has to be done when setting up the iPhone, but it failed due to some bug.

It's appalling to see how poor there QA is for a company that big. They also have a migration tool for migrations between android devices without going through a Google drive, but this one didn't work either when I tried it two years ago.

Re: Signal Secure Backups

#368

Post by purpleidea »

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…

The signal org does some sketchy things. Like for example, why won't they release all of their infra automation backend code. There's no reason this and all the other tiny bits should be kept a secret!

Re: Signal Secure Backups

#369

Post by the_gipsy »

szszrk wrote: post #360
the_gipsy wrote: post #358

A 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?

Personally, I eat the cost of self hosting a small matrix homeserver. For developing a commercial project, I don't have an alternative, because e.g. being upfront and saying that you will eventually screw over your users eventually, is not an option in this economy.

Re: Signal Secure Backups

#370

Post by purpleidea »

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…

Hey, please get signal to release all the infrastructure automation code so someone could audit all of signal's infra and even fork if we ever needed to because of U.S. laws or so on.

There's no reason to keep it secret and no reason why signal won't speak to this point.

Thanks!

Post reply on HN