[abraham]

Signal recently introduced cloud backups. https://signal.org/blog/introducing-secure-backups/

[Nextgrid]

Only in the Beta Android app for now... Signal is around for what, a decade now? And they still can't (or rather, refuse to) do the basic "copy the SQLite DB file to a folder". Edit: and even this beta feature is some bullshit proprietary thing with their own cloud and subscription rather than simply "let me export the DB file and stick it in a cloud provider of my choice".

Last time I had to reinstall my phone I ended up finding an implementation of their phone-to-phone transfer protocol to emulate a "new" device I'm transferring to just to get a dump of the data (I'd share, but don't want them to close this option, since clearly the lack of export option is very much intentional).

Then I deleted Signal and begrudgingly moved to WhatsApp (in addition to iMessage which I've already been using).

[abraham]

Signal has had a backup to a file you can do any you want to for years.

[gsa]

Looks like the needle has moved, but reading the blog it's a recent development and only available in the beta version of the Android app.

[abraham]

They've probably expanded support since the initial announcement