Until now, if you lost or broke your phone, your Signal message history was gone, a real challenge for everyone whose most important conversations happen in Signal. So, with careful design & development, we’re rolling out opt-in secure backups.

Secure backups will let you save an archive of your Signal messages remotely in privacy-preserving form, refreshed daily.

Now available in the latest Android beta release, rolling out to iOS & Desktop soon

https://signal.org/blog/introducing-secure-backups/

Introducing Signal Secure Backups

In the past, if you broke or lost your phone, your Signal message history was gone. This has been a challenge for people whose most important conversations happen on Signal. Think family photos, sweet messages, important documents, or anything else you don’t want to lose forever. This explains wh...

Signal Messenger

@signalapp

  • Why is this remote-only?
  • Where is my backup stored, exactly?
  • What guarantees are you giving concerning the availability of one's backup?
  • Why is this still, in 2025, all tied to smartphones, and to phone numbers, with desktop applications being only second-class citizens of the ecosystem?
  • @tuxwise @signalapp
    local backups already exist. This is an additional service.

    (edit: On Android. My bad).

    @uvok @tuxwise @signalapp Well, on iOS they don't, sadly.

    @jaffex @tuxwise

    ah, is that it? My bad, I only know it's on Android and assumed it's on iOS as well.

    Can you give some more info? I don't see the option in the desktop app or my mobile app. (iOS) Sure you can zip up the appdata on desktop but that's not guaranteed portable and you can't re-import or merge histories on a new install

    @uvok @tuxwise @signalapp

    @uvok @tuxwise @signalapp not yet on iOS, but that is coming as well with incremental backups and multi-platform restore.