[ruffrey]

I would pay for a few signal features: 1. encrypted backups or backup integration of my chats, photos and videos. 2. business features (backup, directory integration, search)

I have not used: 1. voice and video

Incredible that SMS costs so much. I wonder if it's worth it because it _saves_ so much in spam and other sorts of fraud or bad behavior?

[Aachen]

I have some good news: go into the settings and turn on encrypted backups. The clients also all come with a search function, even if it only matches against start-of-word (which includes URLs, so you can't search for domain names which regularly bothers me).

Directory integration, as in, importing a vcard with everyone's phone number into your device such that you can tap on anyone's name and message them on Signal if they've got Signal installed?

[lannisterstark]

>: go into the settings and turn on encrypted backups.

Fair warning: It will...bloat. It usually keeps 3-4 copies of most recent backups in the folders you select and if you send a lot of photos, imagine it eating tens of gigabytes of storage just for backup.

(My current backups are 9.75 gigs each, approx 3 of them)

[crtasm]

The backup option is Android-only.

[Aachen]

O.o TIL. That's weird, apple users already have plenty of lock-in and own-data-inaccessibility, but so maybe they figured they clearly don't care? Weird as heck either way

Then what I can recommend is installing the desktop client on a server somewhere and reading its sqlite-like (but with some flaky encryption extension) messages database