Like many of us, I just recently switched over to Signal from WhatsApp and I’ve been getting all my contacts to do so as well. Thanks Elon.
One thing threw me off with Signal was that there was no obvious way to backup my Signal backups onto my Google Drive. I’ve made the mistake one too many times where I think I’ve backed up everything on my phone and then realize after it’s too late that I forgot something. So now I always make sure everything is auto-syncing in the background.
Step 1 – Enable Backups on Signal
Step 2 – Install the free Autosync Google Drive application
Step 3 – You’ll likely need to upgrade Autosync Google Drive to the Pro version, or else it won’t allow you to sync files larger than 10MB. I made that mistake at first with the free version and it took me a few minutes to figure out why it wasn’t syncing.
Step 4 – Sync the /storage/emulated/0/Signal folder with any folder of your choice in Google Drive
Step 5 – Set it AutoSync Google Drive to sync however long you would like, I’d suggest once every 24 hours is good enough.
Thanks for sharing. I tried the approach. Results: (1) Have to manually start the Signal backup each time. It’s not on a schedule — you have to remember to create backups. That means if you destroy or lose your phone unexpectedly you may not have a recent backup. (2) Signal creates a >>new<>each<< backup. It's not incremental. (3) The backup app (AutoSync) has to back it up in entirety for each backup. That could be gigs each time. (4) So if you're doing this just to migrate phones, it's not adding much functionality nor safety due to the manual steps involved. If you're doing this as a daily backup, you will run out of space on your phone and cloud drive quickly. Finally (5) You just granted access of your Google Drive AND your Signal Backups to a company in Czech Republic by using this solution if you're OK with that.
You have a better solution?
You would think that a company like Signal would be interested enough in building their market share by engineering a workable solution to the very significant problem of automated backups of a Signal message repository.
I just lost a ton of message data because my phone was stolen and the backups that I thought were happening were not actually happening.
So yeah … my “better solution” is to stop using Signal.
For in case anybody stumbles on to this article towards the end of 2024 like I did, some of the above problems mentioned by “Synergy” have been solved:
(1) Signal now has a scheduled backup in place, so it will automatically back it up at a specified time. It seems that the default is 02:15 in the morning, which works for me.
(2) The incremental backup thing still seems to be an issue, if there is a workaround for this I’ll update this comment, and therefore:
(3) is also still an issue. To be fair – WhatsApp also has this issue, it re-uploads every new backup file to your Google Drive after deleting the previous one.
(4) There is still no solution or workaround for this apart from doing manual pruning on your phone.
(5) I fully agree that this is a big privacy issue. It is one thing to trust Google with your data (you shouldn’t), but another thing entirely to trust an unknown third party with the same (you definitely should not!). In my case I use my own self-hosted Nextcloud instance (you can use the hosted version for this too), and sync my backup folder from my phone automatically. This also means that when I delete old backup files, the sync will delete the same file on Nextcloud automatically, which takes care of point 4 to some degree.