Signal Secure Backups

Summary

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 why the most common feature request has been backups; a way for people to get Signal messages back even if their phone is lost or damaged.After careful design and development, we are now starting to roll out secure backups, an opt-in feature. This first phase is available in the latest beta release for Android. This will let us further test this feature in a limited setting, before it rolls out to iOS and Desktop in the near future.Here, we’ll outline the basics of secure backups and provide a high-level overview about how they work and how we built a system that allows you to recover your Signal conversations while maintaining the highest bar for privacy and security.Secure Backups 101Secure 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.This is the first time we’ve offered a paid feature. The reason we’re doing this is simple: media requires a lot of storage, and storing and transferring large amounts of data is expensive. As a nonprofit that refuses to collect or sell your data, Signal needs to cover those costs differently than other ...