
Why is it so hard to back up and restore Signal? Why do you lose your keypair? - moyta
Hey, so I seem to have reached a dead end here, Signal appears to only offer plaintext exports, adb backup doesn&#x27;t work, and importing a 29MB plaintext backup causes the new phone (an H631) to hang (sitting at the 35min mark waiting on Signal to import the backup).<p>I don&#x27;t understand why I can&#x27;t do a normal encrypted backup, I remember it working fine most of the time when I used to rerom, and when it didn&#x27;t I could always do another backup and it&#x27;d be fine. Now, my father has changed keys due to changing phones &amp; he has no SMS history and a few dozen Signal contacts who have to click a button before they can read new texts from him.<p>Why can&#x27;t there be a checkbox in Settings to say something to the effect of &quot;This feature may be broken, I understand and wish to try it&quot; instead of literally no options when it comes to moving mobile devices?<p>Also, on another note, why no opus support? I&#x27;ve enabled it on a few hundred of our deskphones, and Linphone &amp; many others support it. The voice quality improvement is tangible and more useful than GIPHY, to the point that I can&#x27;t get other Signal users to call me via Signal due to the poor call quality.<p>Overall, it seems like Signal is getting harder and harder for myself and others to use over time, people want something where they can mail their &lt;fill in the blank&gt; a new phone, point them at a 3 step process to move their Signal data over, and that is it!<p>My father should be able to do this, just:<p>* Press Export encrypted backup
* Move MicroSD to new phone
* Press Import Encrypted backup<p>And that should be it! This is a baseline feature, even PGP does better by miles with this than Signal does, and I started out using Signal <i>because</i> it was easier and better than PGP, only to watch features slowly disappear. Its like feature atrophy.
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unhammer
fwiw, [https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-
Android/issues/4577...](https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-
Android/issues/4577#issuecomment-228627416) lists a workaround. Not usable for
mere mortals unfortunately :(

