[proactivesvcs]

I'd find it useful if I could access my Signal chat logs in plaintext. The software offers no facility to do this on any platform, and on Desktop the programs that have allowed me to take proper backups are (by necessity) a moving target because of changes to the database, so I am constantly having to get around to updating them and occasionally even that's a pain.

[JumpCrisscross]

> I'd find it useful if I could access my Signal chat logs in plaintext

I'd probably also find it useful if I could access your Signal chat logs in plaintext. That's the problem.

[jazzyjackson]

If someone has enough control of the app to utilize its export-to-plaintext button you were SOL anyway, there are plenty of use cases for “export a password protected encrypted blob of chat history so I don’t lose everything every time I switch devices”

[JumpCrisscross]

> If someone has enough control of the app to utilize its export-to-plaintext button

Or find the lowest-paid, most-indebted and/or most-adulterous member of the TeleMessage team and bribe and blackmail them.

[Zambyte]

Signal already has exactly that? That isn't the same as a plain text export like the GP was saying though.

[XorNot]

It'd also be useful if backups on Android actually streamed somewhere off the phone so they could be meaningfully appended to, kept. Or handled per channel (i.e. my baby pictures channel with family).

[nicce]

That would hit the Google One revenue if people would use alternatives…

But also, it must have something to do with law enforcement. On the other hand, Google may say that forensic investigation of phone is harder (if no jailbreak), but on the otherhand it is easier to hand over the data behind the scenes from the remote cloud.

Backups are not E2EE by default (user can enable, so they have an argument), so in most cases law enforcement can access WhatsApp messages, SMS messages and anything else without a problem. Many people don’t think about this, and defaults matter.

[walterbell]

PhotoSync can incrementally backup iOS/Android photos to self-hosted or cloud storage targets, with optional encryption, https://www.photosync-app.com/support/encryption

[proactivesvcs]

...and if the restore process wasn't so fragile. The only time I needed to backup and restore it just crashed part-way through, so the backup process wasn't even doing any validation.

[hedora]

The lack of encrypted (and cross platform) backups is the biggest security hole I know of in Signal.

People inevitably end up working around it, which can mean using SMS, copying the threads / screenshots / attachments to arbitrary other storage, or switching to things like TeleMessage because of record keeping requirements.

I wish Signal were less hostile towards forks. I'd happily switch to a client that uses their network, but that's compatible with iCloud backup.

[Zambyte]

This comment confused me a lot, because Signal has encrypted backups, just not cross platform. Looking into it more, it seems that iOS only has a "transfer" option instead of allowing backups. It's hard not to suspect this is due to arbitrary limitations on filesystem access on iOS.

[nicbou]

Neither do other chat apps.

It's usually impossible to regularly export your chats to a machine you own in a format you can use. Same with photo apps.