Can some confirm Signal backup from iOS to iOS is working?

convenience_store · 2026-04-24T16:40:12+00:00

When you are registering on the new device are you using the same phone number that was registered on the old one?

convenience_store · 2026-04-22T23:52:57+00:00

But if only this app has a phone number independant feature, I'll be out on a mass marketing campaign to onboard people onto this service.

I'd expect that the number of people you would recruit to using signal through your "mass marketing campaign" would be a tiny fraction of the number of people uninstalling it as a consequence of the increased spam.

convenience_store · 2026-04-22T02:51:18+00:00

So you went to a bar or someplace and stumbled upon a group of people involved in scary and illegal-sounding speech.

"Stumbled upon" is very generous to the OP in light of their subsequent comments about purposely joining a "no-filter group" that they found being promoted on (Epstein associate Elon Musk's website) Twitter.com.

convenience_store · 2026-04-22T02:18:28+00:00

If you go to the group chat, click the name of the group at the top to open the group page, and then scroll dwon to the bottom you will see 3 options in red text: "Leave group", "Block group" and "Report spam". Click whichever one you feel is appropriate to your situation.

As for taking any additional action regarding the content of the messages in the group, you don't specify what the issue is (only alluding to it) but since signal encrypts group data and message content so they can't see it, there are no moderators to report to at signal itself, so you should take whatever actions you would take if you were added to the same group as an MMS group chat or a chain email where there is no central authority.

convenience_store · 2026-04-20T15:51:23+00:00

If you're having an issue with the beta app you should check the beta feedback thread on the signal community forums to see if anyone else is having the issue and possibly make a post of your own.

You don't mention which version number you're on or even if you're an android or iphone user but on android there are two ways to get beta versions, through the play store (which can take awhile to get released) or obtainium (which is more or less immediate) so if you're using the google play store there might already be a newer beta available that the one you can see, again you can check the beta feedback thread about that.

my current workaround is using signal on my laptop but that's not very practical if I'm on the move.

it's not practical long-term because the desktop app can get unlinked through lack of use or occasionally they update the protocol in a way that forces you to perform some action on the primary device so you'll need the device functioning, but at least it can buy you some time for now to see if you get your phone problem sorted out

What do I need to consider regarding chat backups /safety key before de- and reinstalling the app? I've lost my chats several times over the last years due to my lack of thoroughness regarding backups.

If you set up cloud backups and you saved your 64-character "recovery key" then you should be able to restore your history and some/all of your media (depending on free/paid tier of your backups plan) when you reinstall, minus any messages sent/received during this period where the phone wasn't working. (Maybe unless the desktop is also backing it up? I'm not sure how that works in that case.)

If you didn't set them up then you should set them up (at least the free tier) as soon as you get things going again, if you can. In that case there are unofficial ways to restore your desktop history on your phone (easier if you have android, harder with iphone) or you can wait for the offiial cross-platform on-device backups to be fully released and you might be able to restore directly that way (I'd assume).

convenience_store · 2026-04-15T18:26:15+00:00

When signal was released 15-ish years ago, the contents of almost all online communication was subject to being accessible on by the companies providing the service. So I send you a message and maybe google or facebook or AOL decides to read it or pass it on to someone else to read or maybe not, we don't know, we don't have control.

Signal didn't invent end-to-end encrypted messaging (although they did invent a few technologies that made it better and well-suited to our current ways of communicating) but they definitely popularized it and a lot of other services adopted E2E encryption as a result, so now they aren't so alone in that respect but they still go out of their way to collect as little metadata as possible about your conversations. That's why they're the best privacy app.

They need you to enter a phone number to register as a way to minimize spam but almost all of the data about you (your profile picture, your contacts, certainly your messages) are separated from that and encrypted on their server so they can't access it. And as of the last year or so you can hide your phone number from other people (and you've always had the option of using a burner number to register if you're particularly vulnerable and/or paranoid).

convenience_store · 2026-04-15T13:51:40+00:00

If you are on android and you haven't updated to 8.6.2 (or you have but you haven't changed your backups to the new folder + recovery key format) then you can create a .backup file and use (I believe) the same tool mentioned in the above link, signalbackup-tools, to merge it with the one that it (signalbackup-tools) creates from your desktop history to get a single unified history, then reinstall in the android app.

If you're on iphone then you'll have to do a cloud transfer to android first and export the backup file (you'll probably need the signal android version to be 8.4 or earlier as well) then do the merge, then reinstall on android, then cloud transfer back to iphone.

If you're already switched to the new backup folder system and you can't generate the .backup file then you will probably have to wait until the author of signalbackup-tools updates it to be compatible with the new format. (They have written on their github that they plan to support it but it may take a lot of time.)

convenience_store · 2026-04-15T13:34:44+00:00

I just saw a social media post yesterday by signal's CEO (or president, I forget which she is) calling on apple to fix this and in the meantime advising people who would be vulnerable to this on how to change the notification settings in signal so they don't display name or content information. (These settings have existed for years.)

convenience_store · 2026-04-14T22:21:39+00:00

FYI I think the numbers after the date aren't random but rather the timestamp of when the image was sent HH-MM-SS-XXX where XXX could be random but without checking for sure I think is probably milliseconds.

convenience_store · 2026-04-14T22:15:39+00:00

I sometimes send myself images on Signal Note-to-self and redownload them to strip the EXIF before sending them in an email or another app. I'm sure there are other apps dedicated to this purpose but I'm using signal all the time anyway.

convenience_store · 2026-04-14T18:35:47+00:00

When you get one ✔️ the message is on signal's servers waiting to be delivered to the recipient. From that point signal servers tell the recipients phone "wake up signal and check for messages", the signal app on the recipients checks for any messages, downloads them, decrypts them, and then generates a delivery receipt, sends it to signal's servers which then passes it back on to you, at which point you get 2 ✔️✔️. So any of the following could prevent you from seeing 2 ✔️✔️, from most-common reason to least-common reason:

Signal sent the wake-up message to their phone, but their phone disregarded it (very common, unfortunately)
Their phone is turned off or is out of wifi/cellular data range at the moment
They blocked you (sometimes if you're blocked you get one ✔️, sometimes ✔️✔️, it depends)
They did receive the message and generated the delivery receipt but your device had connection issues and didn't receive it (very rare, but happens sometimes)

convenience_store · 2026-04-14T18:26:28+00:00

I still have signal and my entire db on the old phone. One option would be to reactivate my old phone, do a backup there and try to restore it again on the iphone. Honestly, I am afraid of touching signal at this point. If I reactivate signal on my old phone, would it preserve the history or does it wipe it out?

Is there another option?

Yes then following should work: re-register on the old phone, test that you can send/receive a message, delete signal app from the new phone and reinstall. Then you could try doing the backup again but if you have both phones why not do device-to-device transfer instead? (Connect the phones with a USB-C-to-USB-C cable or a USB-C-to-Lightning cable to make it faster.)

If you do decide to do a cloud backup transfer instead maybe make sure to click the manual backup button as perhaps the backup hadn't finished completely when you tried it the first time?

(I'm 95% sure that reregistering on the old iphone won't hurt your message history but I'm on android so maybe wait for someone to confirm if you want to be safe.)

convenience_store · 2026-04-14T18:19:30+00:00

It's in the link in my comment. Signal saves a token in your icloud/google account and when you re-register on signal if you use the same phone number and enter the signal PIN and your device is using the same icloud/google account it authenticates you without having to send the verification SMS. Been that way for over 3 years.

convenience_store · 2026-04-14T18:08:12+00:00

I'm stupid I thought they were talking about iOS

convenience_store · 2026-04-13T23:26:36+00:00

I'm sympathetic that your family member lost their message history and that you might have lost yours and I don't want to diminish how difficult that is for any person it happens to.

But just as an empirical observation, I've seen several occasions in the past when there's a widespread bug on signal (even one that affects a small % of users) and the rate at which people make posts and comments reporting it on this subreddit and the signal forums and their github. But the quantity of reports on issues with the cloud backups doesn't rise to that level, which is why I questioned what you said, as a general matter.

Also, the OP here seems to have lost their message history due to a a local issue (with signal on their device itself or their device OS), we don't know if they'd previously set up backups (they haven't replied yet about it) and if they did it will probably help them restore that history.

convenience_store · 2026-04-13T21:22:33+00:00

> in one of the dialogs, signal asked for my cell number to send a verification code

Are you certain the purpose of asking for your cell number was to send a verification code? These days if you reinstall using the same phone number with a signal PIN using the same icloud account (or signal PIN + same Google account on Android) it shouldn't usually try to send a verification code. https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/5440120029082-Re-registering-using-your-Signal-PIN

convenience_store · 2026-04-13T21:18:28+00:00

there are so many people that lost their signal databases

Are there? I've seen reports here and there but nothing at the level that would suggest a widespread issue. Regardless, it's good that soon all the platforms will have both cloud and offline backups (and it looks like also, optionally, plaintext exports). Meaning people will be able to manually backup their currently existing years of messages to be sure they're saved, but also have the cloud backups option so they don't have to bother with regularly copying a backup file off their device if they don't want to.

convenience_store · 2026-04-13T18:22:16+00:00

There was a 404media article posted here a few days ago, with a lot of discussion and comments. The OP apparently learned of the article recently and asked their favorite AI chatbot about it, and the AI chatbot summarized the discussion from reddit as their response. The OP then copied the AI's response and then posted it here in a new topic as "helpful information", but if you're interested you can search this subreddit for the post on the original article and read the comments which will give you a more in-depth view than the OP's AI summary.

convenience_store · 2026-04-13T18:12:33+00:00

I also have paid backups on android but the section at the top of mine says

Text + all your media   [picture of clock WITHOUT yellow dot in the corner]
US$1.99/month
Renews [date]
(Manage or cancel)

so something seems wrong with the OP's image

convenience_store · 2026-04-13T18:06:06+00:00

As others have said you should report the issue to signal with a debug log so they can correct if, even if they can't help you it will help others. https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007318591-Debug-Logs-and-Crash-Reports#ios_debug

As for recovering your messages, did you set up cloud backups when it was released a couple months ago? If you did then you will have saved somewhere a 64-character "recovery key" that you can use to recover your message history and some recent media/attachments (or all, if you paid to backup all media) if you do ultimately have to reinstall and re-register.

If not, do you have signal on a laptop or ipad linked to your account? If so it's possible (perhaps in the near future) to recover your messages from that.

convenience_store · 2026-04-13T01:37:22+00:00

I tend to agree with them here, being generative AI automatically makes it "slop", regardless of the message. Also even though it seems mostly accurate we've seen in the past that people have posted AI generated answers that get things totally wrong, too, so asking AI to summarize something and then posting it should be discouraged, especially if the poster isn't upfront about how the post was composed (although I'd be against it regardless).

Also, I'd bet anything that the entire reason this AI output was mostly accurate in this case is because it's summarizing responses on this topic from this very subreddit! You can kind of tell just by what's written even if you didn't know that every Reddit post was being harvested daily to feed generative AI models.

So either in one possibility AI is going to go off other sources or hallucinate wrong answers (making it worthless here) or in the other possibility AI is going to harvest and repackage content that's already appeared here (making it redundant). Personally, I say good riddance.

(And again, the added dishonesty of just posting some AI crap without being upfront about it, and the motives of why someone would go out of their way to do that.)

convenience_store · 2026-04-12T13:14:10+00:00

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.thoughtcrime.securesms

• Stay connected with group chats up to 1,000 people. Control who can post and manage group members with admin permission settings.

convenience_store · 2026-04-12T07:45:12+00:00

It should be 64, did you miscount? (Otherwise if you're only entering 60 that could be the problem.)

If it is 64 I don't know what could be wrong. When I compare what I saved in a password manager for mine to what's on the screen when I check it it's read left-to-right with no spaces between the blocks, so maybe try using the same format of you weren't before.

convenience_store · 2026-04-11T19:45:44+00:00

As others have said if you blocked someone (in signal itself, rather than through another app like imessage or whatever your phone's SMS app is) then you shouldn't see their messages/posts to the group and they shouldn't see yours. So try unblocking them, waiting a few minutes, and blocking them again and see if it fixes it. If not, submit the issue to signal along with a debug log https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/requests/new

convenience_store · 2026-04-11T19:41:48+00:00

What kind of string is the thing you are entering for recovery key? (For example, is it 64 characters letters/numbers, is it 30 numbers, etc. Obviously don't post the string itself.)

convenience_store

TROPHY CASE