I just mention some scary keywords in my search queries and let the government host my backups for me. It’s convenient, automatic, and (due to new vibe-coded evidence storage systems) readily accessible from anywhere.
Kinda wonder what the actual cutoff is regarding the legality of those statements. Like “I want to-” and “I wish someone would-” don’t really carry any actual threat. As opposed to something like “I’m going to-” which, yeah, straight to jail.
You know, I’ve always wondered if local sexpot was thrown from that balcony for his anti-establishment and “eat the rich” positions. I think he was too dangerous to them. Tragic loss for the rest of us.
Been donating for a few months now, hoping they won’t cave to chat control pressure.
Its so annoying, I hate this “if you have nothing to hide…” mentality. The law sucks and is not fit for purpose, if it was its benefits would still not outweigh the costs.
Anyone in that horrible space is operating at a different level, anyone who is not should be caught by standard policing and parenting.
There is a brilliant podcast, hard listen but fantastic doc, called hunting warhead and it shows that this stuff is not happening on the open web. Your everyday scumbag is probably on tiktok or roblox where the victims might be.
I’m already daily-syncing to my own homelab, but this is nice. They eventually had to have a way to make money.
Anyone able to get Signal backup to work with a Proton Drive folder on Android? Technically speaking that’d achieve the same result
Not automated, but I have a regular signal backup to a local folder that occurs nightly. I manually push a copy up to proton drive once a month or so. 🤷♂️
If Proton supports WebDAV: Theres Davx5. Also Theres for sure lots of foss smb and FTP mounting apps
Are people not copying their backup off their device periodically?
Personally I’d find it useful to create backups by year so the process doesn’t take twenty minutes and wouldn’t create a massive backup file.
A couple years ago I had to make an effort of sending gallery links instead of sharing images and video directly through Signal since my backup file had grown so large. It’s a bit arduous.
Are people not copying their backup off their device periodically?
Do you change your air filter, clean your keyboard, floss your teeth, derust your tools, organize your files, respond to all your messages, keep on top of available tax breaks and deals, dust under your bed etc?
No one does every random maintenance task as often as they should meaning that everyone is letting some slip occasionally which means you should expect that no, not everyone is periodically backing up and transferring their DMs to a different device.
Does having an app on the desktop PC do this for you basically? If I lost my phone today but signal was still installed on my PC. Wouldn’t that be a backup?
Unfortunately no, the new installation on the phone will not sync any previous chats from a desktop client.
Ah bugger, I suppose automating some sort of local/cloud/NAS backup is essential for that then.
Well my point was not that every random maintenance task under the sun gets done and ticked off a mile long list.
It seems a reasonable guess that a person whose hobby is building custom mechanical keyboards probably does keep it clean. I figured people using an encrypted messaging system with backups enabled would probably go to the trouble of ensuring those backups didn’t live in one place.
From your comment and a few others, it’s evident I was wrong in this thought. Among other things, it seems some people don’t want backups at all, which is a bit surprising to me. That’s why I asked the question.
It seems a reasonable guess that a person whose hobby is building custom mechanical keyboards probably does keep it clean. I figured people using an encrypted messaging system with backups enabled would probably go to the trouble of ensuring those backups didn’t live in one place.
The point is that encrypted messaging is not a hobby for anyone but Moxie Marlinspike. It’s just a tool that people use for communication. WhatsApp and iMessage are both encrypted and have relatively seamless backup solutions and do not require any extra thought or effort.
Is Signal equivalent in scale to iMessage or WhatsApp? Does it come preinstalled on devices as well? All three are tools, I agree, however one of these things is not like the others. The average toolbox will have Phillips and Robertson screwdrivers, but not a Torx type.
Signal takes at least a grain of interest to even get a user to install it, whereas iMessage is already there ready to go and that suits most people just fine. The question I asked was based on my incorrect assumption that centred in the Venn diagram of people whom bother to use Signal, read a technology forum, and look at an article about backups, there would also be an overlap with people that already had a backup solution in place.
Your Marlinspike comment notwithstanding, thank you for demonstrating that I was wrong. I should have remembered most people just want to drive a car, not concern themselves with how or why the wheels go round.
It is weirder to me that people back shit like this up. I have zero desire to keep a backup of chat and random images people have sent me.
I’ll run a backup and restore when moving to a new device, because why not. But regular backups? Meh, the ether can have my messages if my phone dies.
That said, depending on how this new system is rolled out, I may subscribe just to support the Signal foundation.
Then why signal? Why mention encryption as important if you offer an extra attack surface for unnecessary things… (the fight against encryption is going on anyway, but there is no need to offer an unnecessary attack surface), but there are also state trojans etc.
I don’t think signal data is included in system backups unless your device is rooted. You’d have to go into signal and back it up explicitly.
I just turned this feature on. I don’t backup my device all, I just expect everything to be in my cloud.
The thing with signal on iOS is simply that there currently is no way to back up your messages.
And I’m kind of going to be a bit pissed if the only way to back up my messages will be to use signal’s servers after this feature is released.
