This looks brilliant. I just hope they make it easy to do test restores. In particular, I want to test restore without perturbing my main device. Let me restore using the secret key on a new device.

When I install Signal on a computer it won't show me message history. Will backups allow me to view _all_ my message history on a computer? A big screen is very helpful for browsing lots of messages.

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greysonp 7 days ago | parent | next [-]

Hi there, Signal dev here. You can sort of do this! You can restore on your new device, and while you will be unregistered on your old device, all of the data is still there. So if you see that something is amiss on the new device, you could re-register on your old device and you'd be right back where you started. This is actually one of the ways we test the feature with our own personal data.

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mdnahas 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Love Signal - Thanks!

Testing backups is important, separate of when you try to restore. It sucks hard to find out your backup is bad only when you go to need it. I highly recommend the quick, beautiful, and informative Tao of Backups.

Mike Nahas, Designer of Par2 file format

http://taobackup.com/

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eigenspace 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Hey, i have a related question about this:

I have an old iPhone that has all my old Signal messages still on it that I wasnt able to move with me when I switched to Android. Is there any way that I can use these new tools to move the old conversations on my iPhone over to my android phone without losing all the new messages that are on my android now?

That is, I want to merge the two histories.

	▲	codethief 6 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Using the new backup feature that we're discussing here (once it is available on iOS), you will probably need to transfer your old iPhone's data to an Android device first (either a secondary one or your current one, provided you have backed up its data to a backup file). Then follow https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45174779 .
	▲	greysonp 6 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Unfortunately we don't have immediate plans to support merging of histories. As others have noted, you may be able to use third-party tools to merge them together, but that's very much a "at your own risk" sort of thing :)

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oezi 7 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Multi-device would be a nice feature.

And question: Will a backup taken today on Androis be able to be restored on iOS once released?

	▲	winterqt 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45171576.

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nuker 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Im still out of luck, I want to reinstall my iPhone (not a transfer to another phone) and cannot find a way to preserve chats.

Signal Desktop app on Mac linked, shows chats, but all pics are missing and "Download Failed" if clicked.

And I'm not sure I can import from Desktop back to my erased iPhone...

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7 days ago | parent | prev [-]

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aprilnya 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

As of a few months ago, when setting up Desktop you do actually get an option to copy your message history to it

	▲	akkartik 6 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Thanks for the heads-up! Signal on the Desktop has receded for me in the past year when I moved to an Arch- rather than Debian-based distro (Ubuntu to Manjaro). This might get me to reconsider. (Ugh.)
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