The web version requires the phone to be turned on and connected to the network at all times draining unnecessary power. It’s also completely open-source.Įven besides its relationship with Facebook I never really liked WhatsApp. It’s end-to-end encrypted and has all functions you would expect from a modern messenger app. When people were looking for alternatives, Signal has been the main beneficiary.

While chats between friends supposedly stay end-to-end encrypted and the update only affects business interactions, it highlighted the increasing integration of WhatsApp into its parent company Facebook and users feared even more data sharing than there already is today. Last month, WhatsApp introduced a new privacy policy that confused a lot of users. Signal has been getting a lot of publicity recently as more and more people are switching from WhatsApp to Signal.

In the end I don't mind how it is stored or how secure it is as I will just have the backup on a NAS in my basement to be prepared when I brick my system again and as the desktop app doesn't allow to read old messages that were sent before the last installation, it would be really helpful to just load a backup.įor the worst case scenario I would also take a backup directly from the iPhone I use as primary device, but as far as I know this isn't possible as well.Signal, the secure and open-source messenger app, images from. In addition, so far I didn't find out how to restore the chats from such a backup. On the Unix Stack Exchange I found this post on how to back up Signal chat history, but it is written for bash and has only limited useability as it only can backup already loaded chats, not force Signal to load everything. Seeing this, I thought that it should be possilbe to use it in another way that allows backups.

So far the only way to use Signal on a Windows machine is to install their 'Desktop version' which essentially is just a chromium browser package made with electron that runs their programme as a web application. I'd like to have a portable version of the Signal Messenger (packed like all the apps from or any other similar site) in order to be able to just copy a folder to an external hard drive so that in the future, if my main install gets corrupted I can just roll back to an old one, but there isn't.

Signal messenger on desktop