Signal Secure Backups

Use cases and attitudes toward backups

• Many see backups as essential to avoid losing years of conversations, photos, and documents when phones are lost, stolen, or upgraded—especially on iOS where there was effectively no real backup before.
• Others treat Signal as ephemeral by design (disappearing messages, no history hoarding) and say they won’t use backups at all.
• There’s clear demand for selective retention: some chats kept long‑term, others auto‑deleted.

Existing vs new backup mechanisms

• Android has long had local, encrypted backups to a file; iOS had only fragile device‑to‑device transfers that fail if the old phone is gone.
• New feature adds cloud backups to Signal‑run storage, with:
  • Encrypted archives keyed by a 64‑char recovery key that Signal doesn’t know.
  • Daily incremental backups (full message blob + incremental media).
  • Free tier: all messages + 45 days of media, 100 MiB total; paid $1.99/mo: more media (up to 100 GB).
• Signal devs say local backups will remain and be improved to be cross‑platform and incremental, and later “save to location of your choosing” (own storage / iCloud / etc.) is planned.

Multi‑device, desktop, and the 30‑day unlink

• Complaints about the policy that unlinks secondary devices after 30 days offline; people want configurable or effectively unlimited timeouts.
• Dev explains new secondary links can copy history (45 days of media free, full for paid), but re‑linking an old install with existing data can’t merge histories yet.
• Desktop can now optionally receive past history on setup, but behavior is inconsistent across platforms and versions.

Security and threat‑model debate

• Some argue cloud backups with a static key undermine Signal’s forward secrecy, especially when one group member’s choice backs up everyone’s messages.
• Others counter that:
  • Recipients have always been able to export, screenshot, or sync local backups to the cloud.
  • Signal’s threat model never guaranteed control over what recipients do with messages.
• Concern over the 64‑char key UX: many users will lose it or store it insecurely; others say this is the only way to keep Signal unable to decrypt backups.

Monetization and storage choices

• Some welcome a paid feature as a sustainable funding stream; others see “media beyond 45 days requires subscription” and Signal‑hosted‑only backups as a money grab.
• Strong demand for fully automated, differential backups to self‑hosted servers or existing cloud accounts, not just Signal’s infrastructure.

Media quality and storage management

• Users want finer‑grained media control (pruning large files without deleting messages, archiving old media elsewhere).
• Complaints that Signal heavily recompresses images and videos; requests to pay for full‑resolution media support.