Will we get an ability to backup on iOS?
Most people don't even realize that if their phone dies today, all of their Signal chat history (photos, etc) are gone.
Most people don't even realize that if their phone dies today, all of their Signal chat history (photos, etc) are gone.
Yes, there are auto-delete options, but those apply to the group/chat as a whole, and other people in some of the groups I belong to want to keep their chat history. I'm not totally opposed to them doing so, but would like the option to just delete my copies.
(Signal uses more space on my iPhone than all my other apps combined, and I've had problems with upgrades being blocked because there wasn't enough space remaining to install them. Manually deleting hundreds of photos from individual groups to make room is such a pain in the ass.)
Admins really should have a "purge all history older than X" option. They let you do it one by one manually, but it's basically impossible to automate, and doing it manually is super tedious.
But what good would that be? If the people in the group I'm currently in don't want to reduce the expiry time of the group we're currently in, why would they join my new group with a reduced expiry time? Even if the new group was exactly the same as the old group, without a setting that makes it less attractive, why would they join my new group when all the people they want to talk to are currently in the old group?
Am I missing something? How do you suppose that creating a new group would play out in a way that improves the situation?
Yeah, it's a thing.
Maybe it's a thing in your corner of the internet, but searching for some combination of "expiry", "flow" and "contamination" in mine only yields results about water treatment, drug manufacturing, or some other chemical laboratory process.
Even trying to think of synonyms for those words doesn't illuminate me in any way about how your previous comment might have any bearing on mine.
I blame Apple TTM.
Chat history I don’t know anyone that cares about it so maybe your expectations are just different there.
The general expectation of, at a first approximation, absolutely anybody who has ever used WhatsApp, is that things do not disappear and get lost.
I don't mean us geeks, spies, enemies of the state, people chased by Mossad. I mean our grandmas and grandpas, our aunts and parents. I've seen enough tears over lost data and I don't see why this needs to happen.
For people (in other comments) who want to lose data: why not have a setting "do not backup my data, I do want to lose it if my phone dies"?
If you want to record all of your chat history with someone and keep it around forever, Signal is not the right tool. Signal is for private communications, and I'm glad that people on the other side of conversations with me can't just export everything with a button press. That would be a massive violation of trust.
Currently you pay 2x the phone storage space to make a backup, and then with something like Syncthing you've got to do even more to not just be storing hundreds of gigs of mostly the same data.
Once any data is off your device and (decrypted) on someone else's, you must assume that they have full control over it, which includes backups. Anything else is poor privacy practice, security through obscurity.