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Backups are only possible on Android, and the most recent Signal non-beta builds have had this feature broken, making backups you had useless. Unless your will

Backups are only possible on Android, and the most recent Signal non-beta builds have had this feature broken, making backups you had useless. Unless your willing to open a bug and be a pest for 2 weeks (and still have access to your old phone/leave it registered) I wouldn't plan on retaining your messages or keys across phones. Its a huge weak point of Signal.

aibara 8y ago
Hmm, that's odd. I very recently had to cycle through using four different phones (one was dying, two ended up being defective, finally got a decent one), and each time I successfully transferred all my messages to the next. I thought that just transferred your messages though, not your keys (I could be wrong there). But it is a bit silly that you need to manually move the file from the old phone/backup location to the new one without some in-app option to do so.
- metildaa 8y ago
  This was circa 1 month ago that I had this issue, and it was fixed in the beta build of Signal Android after a few days. Moving to the beta channel doesn't really help if the old device is not avaliable anymore, as the backup is still not usable.
izacus 8y ago
Even in that case, you could only backup on device storage, had to write down (!) a huge set of numbers and manually copy files around. The whole flow is awfully terrible to any user - at least WhatsApp can sync your profile over Google Drive. Last time my phone died, I lost all of my Signal group memberships, because the app is incapable of transfering those to a new phone without backup... and it's also incapable of doing the backup automatically. Those UX choices continiously baffle me - it's like authors didn't learn anything from the failure of PGP.
- metildaa 8y ago
  Backups are low priority for Signal, and they don't want to make security compromising choices like WhatsApp does with backing up. It'd still be nice if the UX and reliability of restoring from backups could be improved.
ytjohn 8y ago
Yep, I ran into this. It really soured me on signal, I definitely disabled it as my default SMS. I have a history of combined SMS and signal messages trapped on one phone. I can read them in the signal app, make backups, but not import them on a new phone. Even if the backup works, the process is rather tricky. You have to get the backup file into a specific directory on the new phone BEFORE you open signal. There's no "import from backup option". If you mess up, you have to uninstall, then do the file copy. There are issues like this going back years.

aibara 8y ago

Hmm, that's odd. I very recently had to cycle through using four different phones (one was dying, two ended up being defective, finally got a decent one), and each time I successfully transferred all my messages to the next. I thought that just transferred your messages though, not your keys (I could be wrong there). But it is a bit silly that you need to manually move the file from the old phone/backup location to the new one without some in-app option to do so.

metildaa 8y ago
This was circa 1 month ago that I had this issue, and it was fixed in the beta build of Signal Android after a few days. Moving to the beta channel doesn't really help if the old device is not avaliable anymore, as the backup is still not usable.

izacus 8y ago

Even in that case, you could only backup on device storage, had to write down (!) a huge set of numbers and manually copy files around. The whole flow is awfully terrible to any user - at least WhatsApp can sync your profile over Google Drive. Last time my phone died, I lost all of my Signal group memberships, because the app is incapable of transfering those to a new phone without backup... and it's also incapable of doing the backup automatically. Those UX choices continiously baffle me - it's like authors didn't learn anything from the failure of PGP.

metildaa 8y ago
Backups are low priority for Signal, and they don't want to make security compromising choices like WhatsApp does with backing up. It'd still be nice if the UX and reliability of restoring from backups could be improved.

ytjohn 8y ago

Yep, I ran into this. It really soured me on signal, I definitely disabled it as my default SMS. I have a history of combined SMS and signal messages trapped on one phone. I can read them in the signal app, make backups, but not import them on a new phone. Even if the backup works, the process is rather tricky. You have to get the backup file into a specific directory on the new phone BEFORE you open signal. There's no "import from backup option". If you mess up, you have to uninstall, then do the file copy. There are issues like this going back years.