Signal introduces secure backups with encrypted message history across devices

Signal has started testing Secure Backups, an opt-in feature that preserves encrypted message history across devices. Until now, losing or breaking a phone meant losing all past conversations, one of the most requested issues users wanted solved. The feature is available in the latest Android beta and will expand to iOS and desktop once testing on Android has progressed further. Backups are refreshed daily, replacing the previous archive with a new encrypted version that includes all text messages and the last 45 days of media.

The free tier provides 100 MiB of storage for text and recent media, while a $1.99 monthly subscription extends capacity up to 100 GB for longer-term storage. This is Signal’s first paid feature, introduced to offset the cost of storing and transferring large media without relying on ads or data monetization.

Backups are secured with zero-knowledge encryption and a 64-character recovery key generated on the device, which is never shared with Signal servers. Media is double-encrypted and padded to prevent metadata leaks, while disappearing and view-once messages remain excluded. Signal has also released its storage manager as open source and plans to add support for saving backups to custom locations and transferring encrypted histories between Android, iOS, and Desktop in future updates.