Hi there, Signal dev here. We are absolutely keeping the local backup feature. More than that -- we'll be improving it to also be cross-platform and incremental, meaning it'll be much faster to both create the backup as well as sync it if you use a third-party folder-syncing solution (like syncthing or something).

This was my question and wasn't clear to me at all from the announcement -- that there was a roadmap for my own (not Signal cloud) cross-platform, incremental, secure encrypted backups as well.

(That presumably would let me store as much as I wanted without a fee).

I wasn't even aware of the existing "local backup feature" making it more confusing -- but reading the announcement I was like, wait, the only backups avail are in Signal cloud? that doesn't seem right, why can't I get my own backup file to do what I want with?

I feel like I now understand, thanks! Personally would recommend the announcement at least reference this future roadmap too, for clarity.

Please add some way to send it over FTP/FTPS/SFTP/SCP/WebDav/SMB/whatever so I can automatically backup to my own server that isn't on my phone. I need something fully automated or I won't often do it. This is also really important if the free space on my phone is less than the size of the Signal archive, and even more so if the Signal archive is more than 50% of the total space on my phone.

Will it be possible to backup messages and media to both Signal's cloud storage and local storage at the same time?

Will the secure backups also be incremental? I've gotten to the point where the backup takes quite a while to generate.