The next best thing to backups

Perhaps the biggest pain-points with Signal on iOS for the longest time has been that there was simply no comfortable way to back up conversations and/or migrate them to a new device (e.g. if you got a new phone). Just a couple of months ago this made me go on a screenshot-marathon, taking many thousands of pictures of conversations my partner and I had had before I got my current phone in 2018.

It took many hours spanning over two days to do so but at least now I had some kind of access to our old messages and could wipe the old phone. Looks like this might have been the last time I will have to do something like that, though! After all these years, Signal for iOS finally has a way to transfer all data when migrating to a new phone! Their website has a detailed description of how to do the migration and also of how the feature works internally!

We recognize that this feature doesn’t cover every single scenario, but we think it’s a good start. We plan on continuing to make improvements to this functionality in the future.

I hope this means that work on a backup solution for iOS will received priority in the future πŸ˜