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Comment by chupchap | Hacker News Reader

Biggest UX challenge with Signal for a normal person is the backup and recovery step. Whatsapp has made the process so seamless and Signal by design just cannot do it.

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It's actually pretty straightforward to do backup and recover with Signal:

https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007059752-Ba...

Yes I have done it, but my wife saw me do it and said there is no way she would go through all those steps.

It's straightforward, but relative to whatsapp it is a huge hassle.

Imagine you lost/broken phone and bought a replacement. Whatsapp would be able to restore all your history while in Signal you are out of luck.

Apple support has occasionally asked me to reset my phone due to some iCloud issue. How do I back up my data and restore it after that without buying a second iOS iPhone?

Agree, but then I think about how often I actually look back at my message history, and it's extremely rare (essentially never further back than a week). Not sure if I'm an outlier or not, and it's strange in that I'll regularly need to find emails from years back.

Well, seamless... on iOS they just lean on iCloud and dump/backup everything with no way of historicizing. It’s easy only until you’ve hit the iCloud free tier limit

https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007059752-Ba...

> How do I enable a backup? Can I use an iCloud backup?

> - Storing messages outside of your active Signal device is not supported.

> - Messages are only stored locally.

> - An iTunes or iCloud backup does not contain any of your Signal message history.

Uh, I thought it was obvious I was referring to to WhatsApp. Have you ever used it?

I used to quite a lot, but not very often these days.

I’m surprised by your answer. You’re literally reacting but ignoring the rhetorical aspects of my question and its implications. I guess it’s a way to drop the discussion

Would a simple "Yes" been a better answer to you? I felt like that would have been to short and wanted to add a little bit more context.

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