The $1.99/m is not for the up front work of fixing what sucks about current backups though, it's just bundling those fixes in with YACSS (Yet Another Cloud Storage Subscription) is the only way to get people to pay their "reasonable" recurring fee.

People here seem to want to answer the question of how to copy data most directly, but only because that's how the problem was phrased. I'm not convinced "users had no way to sync data on their phone" was/is a real problem worth paying for YACSS for in the first place.

Explicitly, from TFA:

> But secure backups aren’t the end of the road. The technology that underpins this initial version of secure backups will also serve as the foundation for more secure backup options in the near future. Our future plans include letting you save a secure backup archive to the location of your choosing, alongside features that let you transfer your encrypted message history between Android, iOS, and Desktop devices.

Not to mention that this is a pretty good way to fund Signal. That's always been a challenge with Open Source projects as not enough people want to donate. On that note, a lot of companies will do donation matching and just saying, that's one way you could go about it if you feel inclined. For an app I use every day, I don't mind throwing them some beer money (and having work pitch in too). I get more utility out of it than my Spotify subscription