Can‘t find a way to create backups

[Schweber]

When creating a new profile, the app offers me the option to restore from backup. However, i can‘t find an option in the app to create a backup.

Maybe i‘m also misunderstanding things but i‘d like to make a backup that contains all my profiles so that i can easily restore them in the future on a new device/new installtion on the same device.

[adbenitez]

hi @Schweber :wave: the option to backup your profiles is in the app settings in "Chats and Media", there you can create a backup of the selected profile or all profiles at the same time, this will create a backup file for each profile, importing a backup is done one by one, there is no way to import several backups at the same time at the moment,

if what you want is to add your profile to a second device to use in multi-device, it is much easier to use the "add second device" option that will create the same backup and transmit it over the local network to the new device without you having to copy the backup file around manually

[Schweber]

Oh i see, thank you!

I’d like to explain why this wasn’t clear to me, so maybe this could be improved:

The language of my device is set to german so the entry in the settings reads "save chats to external memory" when translated to english. I thus thought that only the chat content is exported and not the accounts, login credentials etc. This all the more as this setting entry is under "Chats and Media" and i want to Backup my login credentials and the chat content is not important to me. The popup that explains more only pops up after clicking on the entry, which i can’t know beforehand.

For me it would have been clearer if there was a top level section called "Backup and Restore" or something like that with a description that tells me what it’s going to do without having to click on it in the hope that it won’t execute immefiately but rather show an informative popup.

[adbenitez]

thanks a lot for your feedback, I agree with you, but if I change it in ArcaneChat, the translation will be wrong for the languages I don't know (I only know English and Spanish) this string comes from the official Delta Chat client, would be nice if it is changed there, maybe open a feature request at https://support.delta.chat or issue at the delta chat repo

a solution that I think could work is to put a description (text in smaller font that some options have in that screen) in that option

[Schweber]

That’s fine. The problem for me is not the translation but rather how the menu is structured. A description text would improve things a lot but i still wouldn’t have expected the backup option to be under "Chats and Media".

Thank you for your work on this great app! Finally i have a chat app that is lightweight, functions well, is super easy to set up (important for my girlfriend 😆) and that is FOSS. 🙂

[Schweber]

To be clear: should i open a feature request for the description/changed menu items in the delta chat repository or is this something that you’re at liberty to change yourself in ArcaneChat?

[r10s]

i do not think, "Delta Chat upstream" will change position of "Backup" soon again.

there were lots of discussions around that all the time (recently here, it was moved around, some testings say A, some say B. the current position is what WhatsApp and Signal are using. the position is not bad.

it is also worthwhile to have some stability, for both, devs and users. even if not everyone shares the decisions (never everyone will :)

but i agree that the title/subtitle can be improved (the following dialog is already much more concrete and contains several hints. on desktop/iOS, the button itself is just labelled "Export Backup" btw)

[adbenitez]

the name of the backups setting was changed in upstream Delta Chat recently, now it should be a bit more clear that it is not exporting chats only