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.
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.
indeed, I have this daily archive backed-up via syncthing like any other data.
I still wait for an option to officially use signal without having to have a proprietary operating system running 😆🥲
Original announcement: https://signal.org/blog/a-synchronized-start-for-linked-devices/
Yay Signal!
Finally I can transfer my one and only chat to my PC
I know right. I wish more people used it. It’s nice and simple. No fuss in the way. And especially now with chat transfers. Should be Gucci.
Thanks, I love Signal, but can we get Android tablet linking?
Molly has it.
What’s Molly in this context?
A hardened Signal fork that works with Signal’s servers and adds features I like that Signal doesn’t support.
I heard signal dislikes forks using its server, did molly get approval to do so, or is this based on generosity until signal can ban them?
I heard that too…1ish years ago and Molly still seems to work okay. I would assume by now that Signal knows they exist, so hopefully they’ll keep playing nice.
TIL. Thank you!
in this context? haha
See the other response to justify that part, heh.
A good time 🌚
That’s why “in this context”!
Still a good time in that context 🤭
Fair enough.
So is there a signal alternative that is fully open source and not under control of one single company?
Bett as I understand it, it’s still from a company and still locked to the whims of a CEO and I’m done with that.
What’s the best alternative?
Matrix as a protocol, and the official client is Element.
I’m baffled Signal didn’t support transferring chats… I thought it was supposed to be easier than Matrix
Simplex chat is a great alternative. I use both signal and simplex simultaneously
Do they allow you to use it without a phone number yet?
Yes. For quite a while now.
Not when I created one a week or two ago. Still requested a phone number before moving to the next step.
Might be dependent on location?
Yeah looks like you still need a number to sign up for an account :(
Ah, sorry, I misunderstood. I thought you were asking if they had usernames that could be used in lieu of a phone number as a contact.
You need a phone number to register but then you can create a username and choose to hide your number
Unfortunately it seems like some people think that that is neutral.
This may be out of date, since it’s been a while since I last tested this, but: will Signal on desktop still store media in an easily accessible folder where the only security is the use of random strings to identify each individual media file with the file type extension deleted? So, for example, if you’ve had the desktop Signal client synced with your account for a period of time and have running conversations that include sensitive media, that media can be accessed and viewed without even opening the desktop app (which also, last I tested it, lacks most of the locking/security mechanisms found in the phone versions of Signal).
Most media viewers can open the files without the need for adding the file extension to the end of the filename, albeit you would be browsing the files in a pseudorandom fashion if you didn’t try to sort by date or size.
When they gonna allow sign up without a phone number. Or allow federation with 3rd party signal severs. Or allow sign up without a phone number that’s linked to ur real identity by law in most countries.
The more I learn about signal the less I trust them.
The day security researchers say Signal is bad is the day I’ll stop using it. Until then, it’s the best option we have that both provides both great privacy and UX. The only thing that comes close - and it still has a ways to go - is SimpleX, but it’s basically a signal fork and it’s devs still support Signal.
Why not use SimpleX then? You mention it but provide no real reason to use Signal over SimpleX
Privacy and security is all about threat modeling. Signal meets 100% of the security needs of everyone I communicate with in my region of the world. There’s no need (especially now that you can hide phone numbers) for the added security benefits of SimpleX.
Additionally, my experience in using SimpleX over the last year+ is that message delivery is not reliable yet. This has forced me and the few people I’ve been testing it with to fall back to Signal multiple times. Because of these reliability issues and lacking UX, I don’t feel comfortable pushing it on others, knowing the tolerance level is low for message delivery failures and UX that isn’t yet up to par with other messaging apps.
SimpleX is not a Signal fork. It is it’s own protocol, service and app. It just utilizes Signal protocol for encryption like every good e2e encrypted messenger out there.
SimpleX allows anonymous identity, federation between servers and still a good UX.
You’re right! not sure why I thought SimpleX was a fork, it’s definitely just using the Signal protocol. Thanks for the clarification. That said, I would objectively state the UX needs some work to get to where Signal is at. SimpleX is oddly both easy to use but confusing and unreliable. I’ve been using it for a little over a year now and very often messages just stop getting delivered or received, forcing a fall back to Signal.
SimpleX is still very promising and more secure than Signal if your threat model necessitates it, but I continue to champion Signal for its ease of use, reliability, and security compared to more mainstream messengers.
Hey u still use signal I’m not saying to stop using it I’m simply saying just cos its better than the alternatives doesn’t mean we shouldn’t demand better.
The signal encryption is provably secure that’s what the researchers analyse. The metadata is a separate story.
