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> You only get to see the backup password ONCE. They create it for you, it's a giant bunch of numbers written in columns. They show you that the FIRST time you

> You only get to see the backup password ONCE. They create it for you, it's a giant bunch of numbers written in columns. They show you that the FIRST time you enable backups, which might be years away from the time you need them. You can create a new backup if you forget or lose the encryption key, and considering it creates them periodically this doesn't even serve as an extra inconvenience for me. I don't see an obviously better alternative for creating an encrypted backup. Why would a password repeatedly be shown to a user?

izacus 6y ago
How do you recreate the key on a broken phone? Also, the dialog showing the code doesn't allow copying or provide any easy way of saving it somewhere. Which makes is very unlikely that many users will successfuly store it. Also the backup itself has no support of syncing anywhere. Your phone fell out of your pocket? Well, say goodbye of all the pictures of your nephew. Pretty much every layer of this process is very user-hostile and provides practically no help for the user to have effective and secure backups.
- vinay427 6y ago
  > How do you recreate the key on a broken phone? What you're looking for appears to be an unencrypted backup, which has clear security implications that Signal (quite reasonably, in my opinion) chose to avoid given that it is storing a file on your local device memory. Honestly, if you don't want to keep track of an encryption key and still want to retain your message history, maybe you don't care that much about your messaging privacy (which is fine). There are plenty of apps that serve this use case. > Also, the dialog showing the code doesn't allow copying or provide any easy way of saving it somewhere. Which makes is very unlikely that many users will successfuly store it. Again, I think this is a conscious choice. Their design decisions appear to work well for those who don't know much about technology but still want a private messaging platform. Allowing unsafe key storage methods instead of (for example) writing it down on a piece of paper might encourage users to take that easier route and Signal wants to lean towards privacy even if that means losing message history. > Also the backup itself has no support of syncing anywhere. Your phone fell out of your pocket? Well, say goodbye of all the pictures of your nephew. I agree that this can make things complicated, but based on the comments here a good number of users don't want a cloud storage solution and would prefer to lose their messages. In any case, this is easy to work around because a Android allows for decent file management, so any one of the hundreds of file sync apps can work for you here.

izacus 6y ago

How do you recreate the key on a broken phone? Also, the dialog showing the code doesn't allow copying or provide any easy way of saving it somewhere. Which makes is very unlikely that many users will successfuly store it. Also the backup itself has no support of syncing anywhere. Your phone fell out of your pocket? Well, say goodbye of all the pictures of your nephew. Pretty much every layer of this process is very user-hostile and provides practically no help for the user to have effective and secure backups.

vinay427 6y ago
> How do you recreate the key on a broken phone? What you're looking for appears to be an unencrypted backup, which has clear security implications that Signal (quite reasonably, in my opinion) chose to avoid given that it is storing a file on your local device memory. Honestly, if you don't want to keep track of an encryption key and still want to retain your message history, maybe you don't care that much about your messaging privacy (which is fine). There are plenty of apps that serve this use case. > Also, the dialog showing the code doesn't allow copying or provide any easy way of saving it somewhere. Which makes is very unlikely that many users will successfuly store it. Again, I think this is a conscious choice. Their design decisions appear to work well for those who don't know much about technology but still want a private messaging platform. Allowing unsafe key storage methods instead of (for example) writing it down on a piece of paper might encourage users to take that easier route and Signal wants to lean towards privacy even if that means losing message history. > Also the backup itself has no support of syncing anywhere. Your phone fell out of your pocket? Well, say goodbye of all the pictures of your nephew. I agree that this can make things complicated, but based on the comments here a good number of users don't want a cloud storage solution and would prefer to lose their messages. In any case, this is easy to work around because a Android allows for decent file management, so any one of the hundreds of file sync apps can work for you here.