With all the controversy surrounding WhatsApp’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.

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 on cloud services like Google Drive or iCloud. Both of those are good things.

How to Enable Signal Chat Backup in Android

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.

  • Open the Signal app and tap on the ‘profile’ icon on the top left. Tap on ‘chats and media’.

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.

  • Now re-install Signal on your phone. Give it the required permissions and Signal will automatically detect the local backup on your phone. Simply tap on ‘restore backup’.

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.

Easily Backup and Restore Signal Chats

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 is great 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.