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The issue with Signal that annoys me most is the complete lack of any meaningful backup/export on iOS. I lost my entire chat history when I got a new phone beca

The issue with Signal that annoys me most is the complete lack of any meaningful backup/export on iOS. I lost my entire chat history when I got a new phone because their bizarre "proximity based" solution failed.

sjaak 6y ago
Why is keeping a chat history important? I don't take notes of IRL conversation I have, they're ephemeral. Not trolling, honestly curious :-)
- FreakyT 6y ago
  I see it like more like email history (I don't really delete emails either) -- if someone sent me something, I like to be able to reference it later. It's not something I do super often, but it's nice to be able to do.
- smarx007 6y ago
  I actually try to take paper notes of almost all IRL/online meetings I take part in :)
  - godelski 6y ago
    Serious question, really? Like when you're just having beers with your friends? Why? Does it make your friends feel uncomfortable? What's the benefit to you?
    - smarx007 6y ago
      I mean work/project meetings, not "social gatherings". Essentially, when an encounter serves more that just a social purpose and information is shared, I either want a record of that meeting (information) to be kept or for that meeting not to take place at all if there is nothing noteworthy (again, does not apply to meetings that have a predominantly social function).
      - godelski 6y ago
        Okay that I get, but I don't understand recording every text since that's more akin to recording social gatherings and private conversations.
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  Accountability and history. I have decades of email history, I’d like the same for my chats.
- karakanb 6y ago
  For me, they literally mean "history". Some conversation with a friend who passed away, chats with an ex-lover, remembering school years, tons of memories. I believe at this point those messages are an important part of my past. In other words, if I had a chance to record, search and navigate through real life conversations, I would have done that too; it is way better to have records than to try to remember things.
  - costsNall 6y ago
    As someone who has saved no chat logs, and just deleted pics, letters, and such from a long gone marriage; IMO, they’re not that important. In fact, shedding that memory shed cognitive distraction I did not know I had. If I want to connect to people I do it here and now. Talking to the past in my head is unhealthy.
    - Forbo 6y ago
      I vouched for your comment, because your experience is still a valid data point. As a counter to that, I lost a close friend to suicide. It was really good to be able to reflect back on the conversations we had and relive the lighter moments we shared together. I agree that dwelling on those things can be unhealthy, but they can also be a valuable part of the healing process.
      - costsNall 6y ago
        Sorry to hear that. I went through the same in my 20s, grieved and moved on. For what ever reason, reconnecting to it just makes me mad and depressed now. He’s not dealing with environmental collapse, political unrest, economic inequality, racism... I find leaning into my anger over reality now leads me to be more productive than ennui over people no longer around to concern themselves with those issues.
    - Daniel_sk 6y ago
      Same here. Emails are much more important to keep.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  I just saved an hour or more of work by looking up a conversation I had in Oct 2020.
- nelsonenzo 6y ago
  a ton of useful conversations and media from my wife while we were waiting for her US Visa, and other family matters.
- qznc 6y ago
  Still annoying is that all groups disappear. Only once someone else writes something, they are available again.
  - colordrops 6y ago
    I believe it's because they are not stored on a server. They only disappear if you delete all the messages. I suppose it could keep an index of groups locally to the phone though.
- eat_veggies 6y ago
  They're different mediums with different expectations of ephemerality. Chat history sits somewhere between speaking IRL and sending letters (but to be clear, is not a simple combination; it's its own thing) and nobody burns their letters when they move to a new house. People do burn their letters for valid reasons (or use more naturally ephemeral media like phone calls, talking IRL, or Signal's disappearing messages) but those reasons are orthogonal to moving house or getting a new phone. In any case, if people want to save chat history, the appropriate response is to support that requirement rather than to tell users that no, we've decided that they actually do not want to do that.
  - officeplant 6y ago
    >nobody burns their letters when they move to a new house Actually that's usually when I finally make the effort to burn old mail that I can't just throw away. (insurance payment paperwork, credit card bills, etc) Maybe I should invest in a shredder.
  - saurik 6y ago
    ... particularly given that Signal does have this feature--maybe not as smooth or easy as it should be, but still totally functional--on Android; so it isn't even a consistent argument that "we've decided they actually do not want to do that"!
- Lutger 6y ago
  Some people use chat software for more than just chitchatting and want the history as a memory. This is the reason why mattermost exists - the devs lost their chat history of some enterprise solution and thought: never again. So they created mattermost.
  - beezle 6y ago
    This. Signal devs should understand that different people have different use cases as well as different tolerances for (theoretical) secrecy/privacy. Some convos/groups are worth keeping history for, others probably not. Signal does not have anyway to know which so should let the user decide and allow for an easy(ier) backup/restore option.
    - solstice 6y ago
      You imply that they don't understand this. Are you sure this is the case? It could be that their priorities are simply elsewhere. Things will take time, even with funding because any crypto/security mistake will be so incredibly more damaging for them than for any other software shop. This goes especially for conversation backups.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
- grishka 6y ago
  I just never delete messages. Chat histories are an integral part of my past, and my past is what makes me, me. That said, I deleted my WhatsApp account today just because some organizations assumed that this was an acceptable and convenient way of reaching me if I gave them my phone number. Didn't use it much anyway.
- jonahx 6y ago
  > I don't take notes of IRL conversation I have, they're ephemeral. Fairer analogy: If you could search transcripts of your IRL conversations at no additional cost (no notetaking), would you? I think most people would say yes.
  - tonyztan 6y ago
    That is a liability. Imagine if every word you have ever uttered to anyone is permanently recorded and can be used against you any time in the future, forever.
    - godelski 6y ago
      Take Twitter and remove even more context from a 10 year old comment.
- AnonC 6y ago
  Do you take photos and keep those around or you just don’t use cameras? If you do preserve photos, why? Before cameras were invented, most people (who couldn’t paint or pay a painter) had experiences and events only in their memories. You could follow that for photos and videos too. Or get a camera that shows the photo you took for a few seconds and then erase it permanently. I’m not trolling either. The point is not whether you value something to look back on in the future or not. It’s that a lot of people value that and would use a service that aligns with those needs. Chats can also have photos and videos that someone else shared. It’s not easy or clear to many people that they should save or offload those from an (unreliable) chat app if they want to look back at those later.
- m463 6y ago
  It depends on what type of person you are. Some people are nostalgic and find great comfort in something like a chat history or a photo album (sometimes they're almost one and the same) Nobody really needs it. Arguably it might be a burden or an impediment to growth.
- jlokier 6y ago
  From time to time, I stumble across some old message; typically an email, photo, chat or even a physical object, and I'm profoundly reminded of some part of my past I had completely forgotten about. People I have lived with, adventures I've been on, jobs I've done, projects I've engaged with, academic papers I'm an author on, and especially special moments and times with loved ones. Intimate conversations. Photos with great stories behind them. Bear in mind also that some special photos, long personal messages and even videos and voice recordings only exist in chat platforms these days. Although I find it is mainly text that has the most profound triggering of memories. I can't make a long enough list of the kinds of things I don't realise are in my memory until it's jogged, and I can't emphasise enough how rich the tapestry of past life parts seems to be. I simply forget how rich my life has been. How much I've done with other people (despite the fact I don't spend much time with people). How many places I've been, how many wonderful people I've been with. When reminded, by accident, it's an amazing feeling, like having a whole past self come to life for a few minutes. I'm, like, "wow, I'd completely forgotten", and enjoying the full VR-in-my-head experience while myriad connections are activated. It's an immensely touching and pleasurable thing to have things like that brought back, and it's completely different from ordinary remembering. It's much more vivid, accompanied by wow feelings, and just does not happen with ordinary recall. In an interesting comparison to day to day thinking, it tends to be very consistently good feeling too. Most things day to day feel like a grind. There are many awful past experiences. But the kinds of memory activation I'm talking about tend to be associated with immensely positive, glad feelings - it's as if those feelings need years to pass and change to happen to "brew" into something that is felt in a different way. Dwelling in the past excessively is unhealthy. But occasionally stumbling across something that awakens a completely forgotten and yet cherished long-lost memory-network is like getting to know myself, who I am now and who I was then, and be amazed at how much larger my life has been than I normally think of it day to day, no matter what I'm doing each day. It only happens about twice a year I guess, if that. When it does I'm also reminded how much larger must the set of other things be that are not being remembered, that would completely and vividly transform my view of my life, and feelings about my life, if they were to be activated. I feel a sense of awe to recognise that my perception of myself in the present is, in some sense, tiny, blinkered and mundane compared to my actual real life, and not at all representative of the fullness of who I am, have been, and therefore will probably be in future. I'm trying to say that, for me, some kinds of accidentally prompted memory-networks are incredibly valuable for obtaining perspective on life; my life, and life of people in general. For me that helps me to connect better to people here and now, and I think it makes me a better person to others, in the now, to be reminded of such things.
prophesi 6y ago
What went wrong with their local device transfer solution? Asking as I'm on iOS and have yet to get a new phone.
- FreakyT 6y ago
  Their solution (as documented here: https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007059752-Backup-and-Restore-Messages#ios_restore https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007059752-Ba...) requires that you place the devices "nearby" and wait for them to detect one another. For whatever reason, neither phone ever "saw" the other one (despite them being on the same network and physically next to one another). I tried this about 10 times before I finally gave up. (iPhone SE / iPhone 12 Pro) What made it more irritating was that you only get one "phone detection" attempt per account transfer process, and you're rate-limited on the server side, so I got soft-banned for 24 hours after several attempts.
  - tricolon 6y ago
    Have you contacted their support? I did, and they informed me they'd fixed the bug in the app update that was published the next day. It might have been a coincidence, but at the very least they were responsive and knowledgeable. (I had the same issue migrating from an iPhone SE to an iPhone 12 mini.)
  - moxie 6y ago
    Yeah, bummer. There were some iOS 14 changes that made this stop working as reliably, which was unfortunately right around the time people were getting new devices. It should be better now, and we're working on more stuff in this area.
    - pgalvin 6y ago
      With respect, as I otherwise feel you’ve made an amazing app on Android and iOS, why do you allow local backups to internal storage on Android but not iOS? Enabling a backup on iOS, even if buried in advanced settings, that lets me export an encrypted .zip (for example, similar to Android) to my internal storage via the Files app would be tremendous. As it stands, I lost a very large amount of message history when an old iPhone broke. I totally understand your reasons for not enabling iCloud backup, but why not a local encrypted backup via the Files app, just like Android? Even if you feel this goes against your ethos, though I do not understand why that would only apply to iOS, it would be far better to go through a few warning messages and back up my messages than to lose years of conversations with a friend or partner who passed away. There’s hundreds upon hundreds of anecdotal stories where people value this or were burned by Signal on iOS, so clearly it is important to a large part of your existing and also potential userbase.
gaius_baltar 6y ago
I'm just curious why this feature exists in Android, but not iOS. Maybe due to some stupid Apple Store rule?
- saurik 6y ago
  There definitely isn't an App Store rule against making your content backup-able: almost all other apps--and notably WhatsApp--have support for this in some way (if not the standard way). (If anything, I am surprised that Apple doesn't make "backup and restore via at least an iTunes encrypted backup correctly replicates your data" a requirement, given how it hurts their ability to sell new phones and undermines their own work making this seamless.)
- proactivesvcs 6y ago
  From what I've read on the forums, by the developers, is that the backup and restore process on Android has been a technical nightmare for them and it's fragile as it is. I presume that since they have limited resources they can only put so much effort into adding the feature to iOS (and improving it on Android) and have been concentrating on improved groups, group calling, Desktop calling, user name support, etc.
alerighi 6y ago
Really, this. And this is the problem that I have also with WhatsApp: i lost all my messages when transitioning between Android to iOS since the backup of Android (that is just a dump of the database) is not compatible to the one of iOS. At the other side there is Telegram, where the conversation are saved on the cloud, which is great, but everyone can delete or edit a message even years after it was sent! And thus even on Telegram you need backups (with is inconvenient, but can be avoided with a script that exports all your conversation scheduled to run every once in a while) I would actually use Signal (or whatever other application) if they would have a simple way to export and also import messages. Best thing would obviously be to make a standard interoperable, at least shared by open source applications, like is done with the mailbox format for emails, so you can take your chat, export them, and import them on another system if you want to migrate from one to another.
charwalker 6y ago
Yes, I'll just backup our chat and send it over to the HK police. At worst a backup from Signal should only be your messages and at best it should not exist. Signal is designed for secure communication not archiving communications you wish to be secure. If you want a texting app try Telegram or something more focused on user experience vs secure communication.

sjaak 6y ago

Why is keeping a chat history important? I don't take notes of IRL conversation I have, they're ephemeral. Not trolling, honestly curious :-)

FreakyT 6y ago
I see it like more like email history (I don't really delete emails either) -- if someone sent me something, I like to be able to reference it later. It's not something I do super often, but it's nice to be able to do.
smarx007 6y ago
I actually try to take paper notes of almost all IRL/online meetings I take part in :)
- godelski 6y ago
  Serious question, really? Like when you're just having beers with your friends? Why? Does it make your friends feel uncomfortable? What's the benefit to you?
  - smarx007 6y ago
    I mean work/project meetings, not "social gatherings". Essentially, when an encounter serves more that just a social purpose and information is shared, I either want a record of that meeting (information) to be kept or for that meeting not to take place at all if there is nothing noteworthy (again, does not apply to meetings that have a predominantly social function).
    - godelski 6y ago
      Okay that I get, but I don't understand recording every text since that's more akin to recording social gatherings and private conversations.
toomuchtodo 6y ago
Accountability and history. I have decades of email history, I’d like the same for my chats.
karakanb 6y ago
For me, they literally mean "history". Some conversation with a friend who passed away, chats with an ex-lover, remembering school years, tons of memories. I believe at this point those messages are an important part of my past. In other words, if I had a chance to record, search and navigate through real life conversations, I would have done that too; it is way better to have records than to try to remember things.
- costsNall 6y ago
  As someone who has saved no chat logs, and just deleted pics, letters, and such from a long gone marriage; IMO, they’re not that important. In fact, shedding that memory shed cognitive distraction I did not know I had. If I want to connect to people I do it here and now. Talking to the past in my head is unhealthy.
  - Forbo 6y ago
    I vouched for your comment, because your experience is still a valid data point. As a counter to that, I lost a close friend to suicide. It was really good to be able to reflect back on the conversations we had and relive the lighter moments we shared together. I agree that dwelling on those things can be unhealthy, but they can also be a valuable part of the healing process.
    - costsNall 6y ago
      Sorry to hear that. I went through the same in my 20s, grieved and moved on. For what ever reason, reconnecting to it just makes me mad and depressed now. He’s not dealing with environmental collapse, political unrest, economic inequality, racism... I find leaning into my anger over reality now leads me to be more productive than ennui over people no longer around to concern themselves with those issues.
  - Daniel_sk 6y ago
    Same here. Emails are much more important to keep.
lotsofpulp 6y ago
I just saved an hour or more of work by looking up a conversation I had in Oct 2020.
nelsonenzo 6y ago
a ton of useful conversations and media from my wife while we were waiting for her US Visa, and other family matters.
qznc 6y ago
Still annoying is that all groups disappear. Only once someone else writes something, they are available again.
- colordrops 6y ago
  I believe it's because they are not stored on a server. They only disappear if you delete all the messages. I suppose it could keep an index of groups locally to the phone though.
eat_veggies 6y ago
They're different mediums with different expectations of ephemerality. Chat history sits somewhere between speaking IRL and sending letters (but to be clear, is not a simple combination; it's its own thing) and nobody burns their letters when they move to a new house. People do burn their letters for valid reasons (or use more naturally ephemeral media like phone calls, talking IRL, or Signal's disappearing messages) but those reasons are orthogonal to moving house or getting a new phone. In any case, if people want to save chat history, the appropriate response is to support that requirement rather than to tell users that no, we've decided that they actually do not want to do that.
- officeplant 6y ago
  >nobody burns their letters when they move to a new house Actually that's usually when I finally make the effort to burn old mail that I can't just throw away. (insurance payment paperwork, credit card bills, etc) Maybe I should invest in a shredder.
- saurik 6y ago
  ... particularly given that Signal does have this feature--maybe not as smooth or easy as it should be, but still totally functional--on Android; so it isn't even a consistent argument that "we've decided they actually do not want to do that"!
Lutger 6y ago
Some people use chat software for more than just chitchatting and want the history as a memory. This is the reason why mattermost exists - the devs lost their chat history of some enterprise solution and thought: never again. So they created mattermost.
- beezle 6y ago
  This. Signal devs should understand that different people have different use cases as well as different tolerances for (theoretical) secrecy/privacy. Some convos/groups are worth keeping history for, others probably not. Signal does not have anyway to know which so should let the user decide and allow for an easy(ier) backup/restore option.
  - solstice 6y ago
    You imply that they don't understand this. Are you sure this is the case? It could be that their priorities are simply elsewhere. Things will take time, even with funding because any crypto/security mistake will be so incredibly more damaging for them than for any other software shop. This goes especially for conversation backups.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
grishka 6y ago
I just never delete messages. Chat histories are an integral part of my past, and my past is what makes me, me. That said, I deleted my WhatsApp account today just because some organizations assumed that this was an acceptable and convenient way of reaching me if I gave them my phone number. Didn't use it much anyway.
jonahx 6y ago
> I don't take notes of IRL conversation I have, they're ephemeral. Fairer analogy: If you could search transcripts of your IRL conversations at no additional cost (no notetaking), would you? I think most people would say yes.
- tonyztan 6y ago
  That is a liability. Imagine if every word you have ever uttered to anyone is permanently recorded and can be used against you any time in the future, forever.
  - godelski 6y ago
    Take Twitter and remove even more context from a 10 year old comment.
AnonC 6y ago
Do you take photos and keep those around or you just don’t use cameras? If you do preserve photos, why? Before cameras were invented, most people (who couldn’t paint or pay a painter) had experiences and events only in their memories. You could follow that for photos and videos too. Or get a camera that shows the photo you took for a few seconds and then erase it permanently. I’m not trolling either. The point is not whether you value something to look back on in the future or not. It’s that a lot of people value that and would use a service that aligns with those needs. Chats can also have photos and videos that someone else shared. It’s not easy or clear to many people that they should save or offload those from an (unreliable) chat app if they want to look back at those later.
m463 6y ago
It depends on what type of person you are. Some people are nostalgic and find great comfort in something like a chat history or a photo album (sometimes they're almost one and the same) Nobody really needs it. Arguably it might be a burden or an impediment to growth.
jlokier 6y ago
From time to time, I stumble across some old message; typically an email, photo, chat or even a physical object, and I'm profoundly reminded of some part of my past I had completely forgotten about. People I have lived with, adventures I've been on, jobs I've done, projects I've engaged with, academic papers I'm an author on, and especially special moments and times with loved ones. Intimate conversations. Photos with great stories behind them. Bear in mind also that some special photos, long personal messages and even videos and voice recordings only exist in chat platforms these days. Although I find it is mainly text that has the most profound triggering of memories. I can't make a long enough list of the kinds of things I don't realise are in my memory until it's jogged, and I can't emphasise enough how rich the tapestry of past life parts seems to be. I simply forget how rich my life has been. How much I've done with other people (despite the fact I don't spend much time with people). How many places I've been, how many wonderful people I've been with. When reminded, by accident, it's an amazing feeling, like having a whole past self come to life for a few minutes. I'm, like, "wow, I'd completely forgotten", and enjoying the full VR-in-my-head experience while myriad connections are activated. It's an immensely touching and pleasurable thing to have things like that brought back, and it's completely different from ordinary remembering. It's much more vivid, accompanied by wow feelings, and just does not happen with ordinary recall. In an interesting comparison to day to day thinking, it tends to be very consistently good feeling too. Most things day to day feel like a grind. There are many awful past experiences. But the kinds of memory activation I'm talking about tend to be associated with immensely positive, glad feelings - it's as if those feelings need years to pass and change to happen to "brew" into something that is felt in a different way. Dwelling in the past excessively is unhealthy. But occasionally stumbling across something that awakens a completely forgotten and yet cherished long-lost memory-network is like getting to know myself, who I am now and who I was then, and be amazed at how much larger my life has been than I normally think of it day to day, no matter what I'm doing each day. It only happens about twice a year I guess, if that. When it does I'm also reminded how much larger must the set of other things be that are not being remembered, that would completely and vividly transform my view of my life, and feelings about my life, if they were to be activated. I feel a sense of awe to recognise that my perception of myself in the present is, in some sense, tiny, blinkered and mundane compared to my actual real life, and not at all representative of the fullness of who I am, have been, and therefore will probably be in future. I'm trying to say that, for me, some kinds of accidentally prompted memory-networks are incredibly valuable for obtaining perspective on life; my life, and life of people in general. For me that helps me to connect better to people here and now, and I think it makes me a better person to others, in the now, to be reminded of such things.

prophesi 6y ago

What went wrong with their local device transfer solution? Asking as I'm on iOS and have yet to get a new phone.

FreakyT 6y ago
Their solution (as documented here: https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007059752-Backup-and-Restore-Messages#ios_restore https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007059752-Ba...) requires that you place the devices "nearby" and wait for them to detect one another. For whatever reason, neither phone ever "saw" the other one (despite them being on the same network and physically next to one another). I tried this about 10 times before I finally gave up. (iPhone SE / iPhone 12 Pro) What made it more irritating was that you only get one "phone detection" attempt per account transfer process, and you're rate-limited on the server side, so I got soft-banned for 24 hours after several attempts.
- tricolon 6y ago
  Have you contacted their support? I did, and they informed me they'd fixed the bug in the app update that was published the next day. It might have been a coincidence, but at the very least they were responsive and knowledgeable. (I had the same issue migrating from an iPhone SE to an iPhone 12 mini.)
- moxie 6y ago
  Yeah, bummer. There were some iOS 14 changes that made this stop working as reliably, which was unfortunately right around the time people were getting new devices. It should be better now, and we're working on more stuff in this area.
  - pgalvin 6y ago
    With respect, as I otherwise feel you’ve made an amazing app on Android and iOS, why do you allow local backups to internal storage on Android but not iOS? Enabling a backup on iOS, even if buried in advanced settings, that lets me export an encrypted .zip (for example, similar to Android) to my internal storage via the Files app would be tremendous. As it stands, I lost a very large amount of message history when an old iPhone broke. I totally understand your reasons for not enabling iCloud backup, but why not a local encrypted backup via the Files app, just like Android? Even if you feel this goes against your ethos, though I do not understand why that would only apply to iOS, it would be far better to go through a few warning messages and back up my messages than to lose years of conversations with a friend or partner who passed away. There’s hundreds upon hundreds of anecdotal stories where people value this or were burned by Signal on iOS, so clearly it is important to a large part of your existing and also potential userbase.

gaius_baltar 6y ago

I'm just curious why this feature exists in Android, but not iOS. Maybe due to some stupid Apple Store rule?

saurik 6y ago
There definitely isn't an App Store rule against making your content backup-able: almost all other apps--and notably WhatsApp--have support for this in some way (if not the standard way). (If anything, I am surprised that Apple doesn't make "backup and restore via at least an iTunes encrypted backup correctly replicates your data" a requirement, given how it hurts their ability to sell new phones and undermines their own work making this seamless.)
proactivesvcs 6y ago
From what I've read on the forums, by the developers, is that the backup and restore process on Android has been a technical nightmare for them and it's fragile as it is. I presume that since they have limited resources they can only put so much effort into adding the feature to iOS (and improving it on Android) and have been concentrating on improved groups, group calling, Desktop calling, user name support, etc.

alerighi 6y ago

Really, this. And this is the problem that I have also with WhatsApp: i lost all my messages when transitioning between Android to iOS since the backup of Android (that is just a dump of the database) is not compatible to the one of iOS. At the other side there is Telegram, where the conversation are saved on the cloud, which is great, but everyone can delete or edit a message even years after it was sent! And thus even on Telegram you need backups (with is inconvenient, but can be avoided with a script that exports all your conversation scheduled to run every once in a while) I would actually use Signal (or whatever other application) if they would have a simple way to export and also import messages. Best thing would obviously be to make a standard interoperable, at least shared by open source applications, like is done with the mailbox format for emails, so you can take your chat, export them, and import them on another system if you want to migrate from one to another.

charwalker 6y ago

Yes, I'll just backup our chat and send it over to the HK police. At worst a backup from Signal should only be your messages and at best it should not exist. Signal is designed for secure communication not archiving communications you wish to be secure. If you want a texting app try Telegram or something more focused on user experience vs secure communication.