Signal has announced new functionality in its upcoming beta releases, allowing users to transfer messages and media when linking their primary Signal device to a new desktop or iPad. This feature offers the choice to carry over chats and the last 45 days of media, or to start fresh with only new messages.
The transfer process is end-to-end encrypted, ensuring privacy. It involves creating a compressed, encrypted archive of your Signal data, which is then sent to the new device via Signal’s servers. Despite handling the transfer, the servers cannot access the message content due to the encryption.
With the introduction of a cross-platform archive format, Signal is also exploring additional tools for message transfer to new devices or restoration in case of device loss or damage. Users can begin testing this feature soon, with a wider rollout expected in the coming weeks.
I’m still waiting for the day that I can make a full backup of my chats and save it on an external hard drive so that I won’t lose all of my message history when I lose my phone.
I still wait for an option to officially use signal without having to have a proprietary operating system running 😆🥲
And I am waiting for a way to use Signal without it ever touching a smartphone) Right now I have a Graphene phone so I can trust it (so Molly works), but before that my phone (like most phones) did not support any degoogled OS. While the laptop (like most laptops can) was running Linux easily. Yet, you have to either use an Android VM or a frustrating command-line client to register!
Yea, that was what I meant to say with my comment 😄 linux phone gang rise up!
You can on Android. If you have an iPhone you can link using the molly signal fork on an android device and then backup using that.
Oooh interesting! Could you please elaborate / share any resources about this?
Here’s a link to their website https://molly.im/ It also links to their GitHub. If you’d want to backup what you’d do is link molly to your iphone signal instance and then the Android client or molly android client of signal allows you to make local backups on device.
Restoring it back to the iPhone won’t be possible but there’s a backup at least. Or rather maybe with that recent change the article talks about it might be possible in the future but not currently afaik.
This is wonderful, thank you so much!
I’ve been holding off from switching to Android (and getting a GrapheneOS x Pixel phone) because I have 5 years’ worth of messages on Signal on my iPhone… I’ll look into this method for sure
I just set up molly today, along with mollysocket and an ntfy server. Liking it so far, just need to get my friends to migrate…
That’s always the hard part.
You can already do it. I have Signal create daily backups, sync it to my NAS using Syncthing with versioning enabled.
Oh fucking shit, setting this up today
Yeah I’ve been doing this