Comment by jwr
2 years ago
Will we get an ability to backup on iOS?
Most people don't even realize that if their phone dies today, all of their Signal chat history (photos, etc) are gone.
2 years ago
Will we get an ability to backup on iOS?
Most people don't even realize that if their phone dies today, all of their Signal chat history (photos, etc) are gone.
Heh. I have the opposite problem. I'd like a way to have Signal auto-delete conversations and media from my device after a certain amount of time.
Yes, there are auto-delete options, but those apply to the group/chat as a whole, and other people in some of the groups I belong to want to keep their chat history. I'm not totally opposed to them doing so, but would like the option to just delete my copies.
(Signal uses more space on my iPhone than all my other apps combined, and I've had problems with upgrades being blocked because there wasn't enough space remaining to install them. Manually deleting hundreds of photos from individual groups to make room is such a pain in the ass.)
Large group chats should have an expiry of one week or so, maybe 4 weeks at the longest, otherwise it gets crazy. Unfortunately the best way to delete those old messages in your local chat is to delete the conversation and rejoin it.
Admins really should have a "purge all history older than X" option. They let you do it one by one manually, but it's basically impossible to automate, and doing it manually is super tedious.
You can make your own group with a different expiry timer.
Well...yes?
But what good would that be? If the people in the group I'm currently in don't want to reduce the expiry time of the group we're currently in, why would they join my new group with a reduced expiry time? Even if the new group was exactly the same as the old group, without a setting that makes it less attractive, why would they join my new group when all the people they want to talk to are currently in the old group?
Am I missing something? How do you suppose that creating a new group would play out in a way that improves the situation?
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I want the ability to load chat history from a backup on desktop. It's obnoxious that a messaging app that bills itself as cross-platform will just permanently lose message history on a client if it's not opened for long enough or if your have to get a new device (or reinstall)
You can, just backup/restore ~/Library/Application Support/Signal (or windows equivalent), the encryption in stored in cleartext config.json next to the sqlitedb on desktop. https://vmois.dev/query-signal-desktop-messages-sqlite/
That's pretty low maintenance for such a cross platform secure chat app, i feel
You can backup Signal photos the same way you can backup other apps’ photos, e.g Google Photos, Immich, etc.
Chat history I don’t know anyone that cares about it so maybe your expectations are just different there.
> Chat history I don’t know anyone that cares about it so maybe your expectations are just different there
The general expectation of, at a first approximation, absolutely anybody who has ever used WhatsApp, is that things do not disappear and get lost.
I don't mean us geeks, spies, enemies of the state, people chased by Mossad. I mean our grandmas and grandpas, our aunts and parents. I've seen enough tears over lost data and I don't see why this needs to happen.
For people (in other comments) who want to lose data: why not have a setting "do not backup my data, I do want to lose it if my phone dies"?
Please, we need this.
Used to be a feature. It got removed.
Do you remember why?
So you're looking for a feature where someone can hit a button and get a clear text export of all the encrypted chat history on the phone? You do understand why that feature doesn't exist right? Backup utilities are regularly abused by criminals and other bad actors to harvest private data.
If you want to record all of your chat history with someone and keep it around forever, Signal is not the right tool. Signal is for private communications, and I'm glad that people on the other side of conversations with me can't just export everything with a button press. That would be a massive violation of trust.
That's just wrong. You can export your chats in a secure format, signal android even let's you do it on a schedule. Combine with a hosted file server like nextcloud or google drive and you have automatic fully encrypted backups
What I'd like is an incremental backup feature in Signal android.
Currently you pay 2x the phone storage space to make a backup, and then with something like Syncthing you've got to do even more to not just be storing hundreds of gigs of mostly the same data.
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This might have been accurate if this feature didn't exist on Android. The simple solution is that the backups are encrypted.
>people on the other side of conversations with me can't just export everything with a button press.
Once any data is off your device and (decrypted) on someone else's, you must assume that they have full control over it, which includes backups. Anything else is poor privacy practice, security through obscurity.
In principle you're correct, but in practice, the lack of an export feature is enough to make sure that 99 out of 100 conversations don't get leaked to third parties. You don't know with perfect certainty which ones do get leaked anyway, but...
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There are multiple tools to convert your backup db from Android to HTML and plain text as long as you have the backup passphrase.
You realize Signal chat history is stored in an unencrypted SQLite DB on desktop right?
If anyone is curious I highly recommend exploring the desktop app implementation. So many of security guarantees that Signal ostensibly provides are gone in desktop environments where any app you have installed can read ~/Library/Application Support/Signal to and see all your contacts and messages in using the encryption key stored in cleartext in config.json.
https://vmois.dev/query-signal-desktop-messages-sqlite/
Wow. Didn't know this. Signal's got a lot of user warnings when doing anything that breaks the security model. I don't remember Desktop giving a "Your chats are essentially unencrypted on this platform" warning.
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Do you realize you can create an encoded backup yes? Like, protected by a password.
The arguments against backups are incredibly dumb