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The current backup system relies on you still having direct access to your phone or a previous backup you moved off your phone yourself.
What Signal is offering now is an automatic backup system that saves an encrypted copy of your data on their own servers which you can access even if you lost your phone and never made a manual backup.
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For what it’s worth, the developers also said the backup system is completely rewritten so that now backups will work across platform and are incremental. Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45176074
Incremental is actually a great improvement!
Exactly.
Its basically what matrix does afaik. A encrypted online key backup with a big ass recovery key for restoring that backup.
While this is good since it provides some revenue beyond donations and also simplifies data backups, I think it’s kind of ridiculous that they still have not implemented a way to restore backups cross-platform (it’s just left as something they plan to do in the future). Like, is it really that hard to just export and import a file in a standard format?
This will fix that too! TheY mentioned it somewhere where
In the post, they say it’s something they plan to do in the future building atop the changes they’ve made, so it’s not fixed yet.
One of the signal Devs has said they’ve already tested restoring cross platform with this new format
I had to track down the comment since no one linked it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=45171576
Hopefully they finish stabilizing cross-platform backups through the new service and port local backups to the new format in a reasonable timeframe, although I’m not gonna hold my breath. I still think it’s completely ridiculous that this (really basic tbh) feature took so long.
Nice. I hope it makes Signal suitable for public official required to archive communications.
Currently signal users probably have no backup, or use a Signal fork that support archiving in a less secure way.
If I understand this right, it’s not really it. If you delete messages in the chat, they will also disappear from the backup as it gets uploaded again.
This doesn’t seem to be an archiving solution.
