Wouldn’t be so sure about the 45 days for Signal. Had to do an “emergency” reinstall of Signal at one of my family members. All messages were lost.

However, Signal has a dedicated backup-function baked in that I’ve used before. (See under Settings > Chats) It should just do want you want.

“There is no other significance to these files.” hahah

thanks for the read

tried seedvault, that’s a broken mess that apparently nobody ever tested IRL.

like, I have two similar phones and I’d like to clone my main device, by trying the built-in seedvault backup thingy. perfect use case to test it, I did the backup, lost the device and I’m now trying to restore it to the new device. in the past was put off with the idiotic “verify you really got the passphrase” screen (you’re supposed to type in TWELVE words with your phone’s keyboard) and was like nah fuck that.

well, this time I persevered and entered the hidden interface for said operations. in it, two choices - backup to phone’s storage or to webdav. don’t have one of the latter ever since I booted the nextcloud atrocity off my systems so let’s try the on-device thingy.

naturally, it won’t let you choose where to store the fucking thing, nor tell you about where it’s at. ddg where the fucker stores the backup - it’s in /sdcard in a dot-folder. for some reason syncthing doesn’t want to sync the fucking thing even though I tried it with a non-dot copy in another folder… man, fuck this, no normie is going through this shit so it’s a moot point even if it works.

let’s try the webdav thing. I have nginx in front of all my self-hosted stuff and apparently it can do a simple webdav share, let’s go with that. after dicking around with paths and users and permissions it sorta works. fine, let’s connect it… nope. the internal webdav client doesn’t like that there’s no user/pass. setting up a basic-auth .htpassword file, trying to remember how to hash the password… ok, you like me now? nope, won’t work over http. seven hells fuck the fucker who conceived this crap.

wait, there’s a separate DAVx option, I’m already using it for calendar and contacts for radicale without https, maybe that works… it most certainly does not, one cryptic error after another, fuck you and the calyx “institute” and whoever let this loose on the populous.

so I give up - I’ll spin up a nextcloud docker instance; talk about waste, this bloated stack only for my FOSS device to talk to my FOSS server, because two devices I have root on, residing on the same fucking LAN 10 cm apart can’t talk to each other, madonn’…

so, phone #1 happily accepts DAVx and starts the backup. I’m observing the molasses-like “speed” and I’m trying not to dwell on all potential points of failure in this stack. after some time has passed, it’s finally done… or is it?

tapping the notification about it being “done” informs me that a buncha apps weren’t backed up because they weren’t used “recently”… who fucking told you to do that!? reviewing the backup UI shows there’s no way to fix this.

fuck it, let’s go over to phone #2 (fresh LineageOS install) and restore what did get backed up. the 12-word screen, fine, start restore… internal webdav - no go. DAVx - no go, you need to install it first. sigh… fdroid, davx, add mount… we done? yep, restore starts!

except, it doesn’t. every app is marked with an icon, indicating that you need to install it first. by hand, individually, 60+ of those. so not only does this useless piece of shit not restore the apps, it also doesn’t restore its data. before you ask, “backup my apps” is toggled ON in both places in the app and the restore flow lists app data (500 MB) and apps (1.6 GB) separately. at this point, I am fucking OUT.

how is a non-techie supposed to use any of this?! this is in its 10th or whatever version, don’t those people have relatives and/or friends who do other shit for a living, can’t you put one of those things in their hands and observe the uselessness of this crap?

software that’s a hassle to use (not to mention, doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do) is never ever getting used, that’s like the definition of useless.

I tried backing up to seedvault through USB once, that did not work at all lol idk where exactly the issue was but the USB would get warm and eventually fail but I could write so much more data to the USB on a computer so it had to be something with the phone.