signal-back

Report suggest there's some beta/stable mismatching going on. While Signal's greatest strength is its privacy features I think that at some point they are going to have to meet their customers/prospects/users' other needs. The biggest one being the availability of chat history anywhere, anytime at their own risk if needed. We won't educate people to use messaging app in the way we want them to (for privacy sensible conversations only) because the vast majority don't use messaging app like that. It's either give up on that idea or heavily advertise that Signal is not a Whatsapp/Telegram/Viber/Messenger/Whatever replacement: it's a tool to use when you want to have private conversations. Maybe it'd be better to leave the Signal messaging app lives its life and allows a third party chat history viewer to emerge. You can already export your

I've tried https://github.com/xeals/signal-back and it's 95% of the way there but could use more attention - maybe it's my backup but the xml-formatted convos were formatted differently than the ones that the sms backup/restore app emitted. I compared just to sanity check it would import correctly but currently I'm unsure if it's a good idea. FWIW it's nice to have a plain text backup anyway, and a lot better than nothing. Maybe it works fine but I'd rather not import a backup that has "weird" results.

On mobile you can do this via backups and use https://github.com/xeals/signal-back On desktop you can copy the appdata folder over to the new device. (warning: this is not officially supported) Note that you must close the app on desktop from the host computer before copying the files over, otherwise the forward secrecy stuff breaks and you'll have to reset the sessions on the migrated computer.

I've made it even easier for Cellebrite... Have access to unlocked phone?: yes Enabled signal backup?: yes Copied key to decrypt backup?: yes Downloaded Xeals signal backup decryptor from github[1]?: yes Decrypted backup?: yes Contacted BBC to inform them you "cracked" signal's encryption?: check Profit [1]: https://github.com/xeals/signal-back

It looks like they implemented a read only version of the App with worse UI, and scary used-by-criminals framing. This is not newsworthy, there are normal tools that do similar things: https://github.com/xeals/signal-back Ugh.

I am pertty sure signal backs up SMS messages and if you enable backups, it looks like you might be able to extract them with this: https://github.com/xeals/signal-back/blob/master/README.md Not great for the non tech-savvy, but I don’t know of any SMS backup strategy that is

I've dumped them to media and plain text with Signal-Back. I'm pretty sure that's all they offer. Edit: last part is wrong, see sibling https://github.com/xeals/signal-back/blob/master/README.md

I have used and promoted Signal before, and I also made the mistake of making it my default sms/mms client. I'm on android. Signal does allow you to make a backup file. Then you have to get that file over to a specific directory on the new phone BEFORE you install signal. But the import rarely works. There are tons of issues on the signal repo, and a lot of them closed with won't fix type answers. I myself am stuck with a history of some signal, but mostly sms messages trapped on one phone because the backup the signal app creates fails halfway through importing on other signal apps. Even if it was reliable, it's way too complicated for most people. People change phones every few years and they expect their data to follow them to the new phone. There's also https://github.com/xeals/signal-back which actually uses the same code as signal t

settings -> chats and media -> chat backup and here's an open source project to decrypt them: https://github.com/xeals/signal-back