Despite all the controversy surrounding WhatsApp’s new privacy policy, if you’re one of the many people going to Signal, first of all, welcome! Now, obviously that means you lost all your WhatsApp chats, but what about Signal messages? You want to make sure your Signal messages are backed up on your devices, right? Don’t worry, here is how to backup and restore Signal chats on Android.
Note: Although you will lose the ongoing conversation when switching from WhatsApp to Signal, you can export a copy of your conversations and keep them for reference in the chat with the same people. We showed you the steps in our guide linked above.
How to Backup and Restore Signal Chats
Because Signal is incredibly high on the security ladder, the app doesn’t back up any of your data by default. Even so, backups are local to your device, not Signal’s servers or cloud services like Google Drive or iCloud. Both of these are good things.
In this article, we’ll walk you through how you can backup and restore your Signal chats and manage your local backups on an Android device. As always, you can use the table of contents below to jump to any relevant section.
How to Enable Signal Chat Backup on Android
As mentioned above, by default Signal disables backups on your phone. This means that if you want to back up your Signal chat to avoid losing your data, or if you’re switching to a new phone, you need to enable backups first. Here’s how.
- Open the Signal app and tap the ‘profile’ icon in the top left. Tap on ‘Chats and media’.
- Scroll down and tap on ‘chat backups’ and then tap on ‘Open’.
- Signal will show you a password in a pop-up window. Be sure to note this because without the codes you cannot restore your backup. Tap ‘enable backups’ after writing down the password.
- You can now tap ‘Create backup’ to create new backups at any time. This will also show you when you created the last backup on your phone.
How to Restore Signal Backup on Android
Now that you have backups created on your phone, let’s take a look at how to restore them. There are two reasons why you might want to restore a Signal backup on your phone.
You are either reinstalling Signal on the same phone or switching to a completely new smartphone. Either way, you can easily restore your Signal backups as long as you switch from Android to Android. Let’s take a look at how you can do this.
Restore on the Same Smartphone
If you are restoring your Signal chat backup on the same Android phone, here is what you need to do.
- First, you need to find where the backup is stored. You can find this by going to ‘Settings -> chats and media -> chat backups’ and looking at what the backup folder is specified as. In my case “/storage/emulated/0/Signal/Backups/”
- Use any file manager app and navigate to that location and copy the file with a name like “signal-year-month-date-time.backup”. Move it to a computer or a storage device for storage.
- Now reinstall Signal on your phone. Grant the necessary permissions and Signal will automatically detect the local backup on your phone. Just tap on ‘restore backup’.
- Enter the password you wrote down when the backup was created and tap on ‘restore’.
Restore on New Smartphone
If you’re upgrading to a new smartphone, here’s what you need to do.
- Copy the Signal folder on your old phone to the /Internal Storage/ directory of the new phone.
- Next, install Signal on your new phone and grant the necessary permissions. It will automatically detect the backup.
- Tap on ‘restore backup’, enter the password for your backup and tap on ‘restore’.
FAQ
Q. Can I restore Signal backup without password?
No, the password is like the backup key. If you forget or misplace this password, you cannot restore the backup. Be sure to write down the password before continuing to enable backups on your phone.
Q. Can I transfer Signal chats between Android and iPhone?
Signal chats are only available for Android -> Android, iPhone -> iPhone, iPhone -> iPad, etc. can be transferred between You cannot transfer chats between Android and iPhone.
Q. Signal backup says ‘saved too often’ during restore?
If Signal shows a ‘saved too often’ error when restoring backups, wait for an hour and try the restore again.
Easily Backup and Restore Signal Chats
So you can backup and restore your Signal chats on an Android device. As mentioned earlier, Signal does not back up your chats to the cloud, which is great for security. Also, chat backups are protected with an encrypted key, which ensures that your backups cannot be read by anyone unless they have access to that key. So make sure you keep the key in a safe place.
So, do you like making Signal chat backups on your phone? Let us know in the comments below. Also, if you run into any problems, you can also pull your questions here and we will definitely try to help you. Also, if you’re still on the fence, check out our article on Signal vs Telegram vs WhatsApp to see if the switch is worth the effort.
