How to Back Up and Restore Signal Chats on Android

Jan. 12, 2021

With all the controversy surroundingWhatsApp’s new privacy policy, if you’re one of the many people jumping ship to Signal, first off, welcome! Now, obviously this means you lose all your WhatsApp chats, but what about Signal messages? Chances are you want to ensure your Signal messages remain backed up on your devices right? Well, don’t worry, here’s how to back up and restore Signal chats on Android.

Note:While you will lose ongoing conversation whenmoving from WhatsApp to Signal, you can export a copy of your conversations and keep it as a reference in the chat with the same people. We have shown the steps in our guide linked above.

How to Back Up and Restore Signal Chats

Since Signal is incredibly high up on the security ladder, the app doesn’t back up any of your data by default. And, even when it does, backups are local on your device and not on Signal’s servers or oncloud services like Google Driveor iCloud. Both of those are good things.

In this article, we will walk you through how you can back up and restore your Signal chats on an Android device, and how you can manage your local backups. As always, you can use the table of contents below to skip over to any relevant section.

As mentioned above, by default, Signal keeps backups disabled on your phone. That means, if you want to backup your Signal chat to ensure you don’t lose your data, or if you’re switching to a new phone, you will first have to enable backups. Here’s how.

Now that you have backups created on your phone, let’s take a look at how to restore these. There are two reasons you may want to restore a Signal backup on your phone.

Either you’re re-installing Signal on the same phone, or you’re moving to a new smartphone entirely. In both these cases, as long as you’re switching from Android to Android, you can easily restore your Signal backups. Let’s take a look at how you can do this.

Restore on Same Smartphone

If you’re restoring your Signal chat backup on the same Android phone, here’s what you need to do.

Restore on New Smartphone

If you’re switching to a new smartphone, here’s what you need to do.

Q. Can I restore Signal backup without the passphrase?

No, the passphrase is like a key for the backup. If you forget or misplace this passphrase, you will not be able to restore the backup. Make sure you note down the passphrase somewhere before proceeding with enabling backups on your phone.

Q. Can I transfer Signal chats between Android and iPhone?

Signal chats can only be transferred between Android -> Android, iPhone -> iPhone, iPhone -> iPad, etc. You can’t transfer chats between Android and iPhone.

Q. Signal backup says ‘registered too often’ when restoring?

If Signal shows the ‘registered too often’ error when restoring backups, just wait for an hour or so and try restoring again.

So that’s how you can back up and restore your Signal chats on an Android device. As mentioned before, Signal doesn’t back up your chats to the cloud, which isgreat for security. Moreover, chat backups are protected by an encrypted key which ensures that your backups can’t be read by anyone unless they have access to that key. So make sure that you keep the key in a safe place.

So, do you like making Signal chat backups on your phone? Let us know in the comments down below. Also, if you’re facing any issues, you can shoot your questions here as well and we will definitely try and help you out. Also, if you are still on the fence, check out our article onSignal vs Telegram vs WhatsApp, to see if the switch is worth the hassle or not.