Secure Signal Backups
Secure backups let you save an archive of your Signal conversations in a privacy-preserving form, refreshed every day; giving you the ability to restore your chats even if you lose access to your phone. Signal’s secure backups are opt-in and, of course, end-to-end encrypted. So if you don’t want to create a secure backup archive of your Signal messages and media, you never have to use the feature.
If you do decide to opt in to secure backups, you’ll be able to securely back up all of your text messages and the last 45 days’ worth of media for free.
If you want to back up your media history beyond 45 days, as well as your message history, we also offer a paid subscription plan for US$1.99 per month.
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At the core of secure backups is a 64-character recovery key that is generated on your device. This key is yours and yours alone; it is never shared with Signal’s servers.
Secure backups first came to Android in September. Signal says it plans to bring secure backups to its desktop app, and its longer term goal is to allow users to transfer message history between Android, iPhone, and desktop apps.
Dan Goodin (Signal, Hacker News):
One exception to the industry-wide lethargy is the engineering team that designs the Signal Protocol, the open source engine that powers the world’s most robust and resilient form of end-to-end encryption for multiple private chat apps, most notably the Signal Messenger. Eleven days ago, the nonprofit entity that develops the protocol, Signal Messenger LLC, published a 5,900-word write-up describing its latest updates that bring Signal a significant step toward being fully quantum-resistant.
It is impressive that Signal is ahead of the curve on post-quantum computing. But speaking as someone who is currently switching between multiple phones regularly, they need to get their shit together on basic stuff like using more than one phone with the same Signal account, and making it take just a minute or less to switch your primary Signal phone from one device to another. Right now it takes me over 30 minutes to switch Signal from one phone to another, and I’m not a particularly heavy user of the app.
Previously:
- US Officials Recommend Encrypted Messaging Apps
- iMessage With PQ3
- Advanced Data Protection for iCloud
- WhatsApp More Private Than iMessage
Update (2025-12-02): John Gruber (Mastodon):
I’m glad this feature became available when it did, and that I enabled it over the weekend. Yesterday I set up my personal new iPhone this year, and this morning, when I tried to transfer my Signal account from my old iPhone to the new one, after claiming to reach “100%” of the transfer, and the Signal app reporting on both the old (source) and new (destination) phones that the transfer was complete, the app crashed on both phones. After that, the Signal app was in factory-fresh state on both phones, without any trace of my account history. I then restored the new iPhone from my brand-new online Signal Secure Backup, and that worked perfectly. And it somehow took far, far less time than the old device-to-device transfer — maybe one minute, versus 15 minutes or so for the device-to-device transfer that wound up failing.
Until now, transferring my Signal account history from one phone to another always felt like delivering a crate full of eggs while riding a rickety old bicycle without brakes on a bumpy cobblestone street.
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This new secure backup system shows that your data can remain secure while also being backed up off device. I’m glad the feature is finally here, but it should have been here years ago.
3 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
All messaging should be ephemeral. On Signal everything auto-deletes after 1 week. Important details are deliberately saved or acted upon in the moment.
Backups, as secure as they might be, stray from the goal of minimizing footprint.
As good as their engineering is, they make some questionable choices. Still not happy with them for their practice for so many years of spamming everyone in your contacts about you being on Signal if you make the mistake of giving them contacts access. After years of dismissing the issue they finally quit doing it.
Privacy and growth hacking don’t mix. Maybe they’ve stopped now but it’s hurt their credibility.
@Hammer Interesting take, though I would say the opposite - I never want my messages to auto-delete, and want multiple failsafes against manually deleting them.
Signal's value to me will be when the app works like iMessage, with Messages In The Cloud style behaviour - multiple devices all showing the same message history, and losing a device is merely a case of logging in on a new one, and the entire message history comes back.
And, it has to send & receive SMS / MMS to people who are not on signal, like iMessage does.
That's the use-case.
A signal that loses any message history with a device, nope. A signal that can't be my ONLY messaging client, likewise, nope, not going to commit the time to trying a dead end for my needs.
