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bepaald / signalbackup-tools

Tool to work with Signal Backup files.
GNU General Public License v3.0
790 stars 38 forks source link

First draft of a manpage in Markdown format. #55

Closed tomperrine closed 1 year ago

tomperrine commented 2 years ago

This is a first draft of a man page for the signalbackup-tool.

It has many flaws and bugs, but has re-factored the info from the README into arguments, selectors, etc.

I have not yet dived into the code to get info on the un-documented arguments, etc.

Meteor0id commented 1 year ago

Maybe add a warning / notion that using this tool means unencrypted Signal chats hit your disk, and could leave forensic traces. Signal was after all designed to never leave anything unencrypted, so this tool should be used with the consideration that your chats are less secure when you use this tool.

bepaald commented 1 year ago

Note that this program should not cause your data to hit your disk unless:

  1. Explicitly asked for it (for example Dump unencrypted database to disk)
  2. Your RAM is full (probably from other processes) and things are written to swap. This program shouldn't use a lot of RAM (not like the entire backup is read in there, just piece by piece when needed). I could investigate using mlockall to prevent this program from ever swapping, but I have no experience with this. I think swapping is pretty rare these days, but on systems that regularly swap due to low RAM, the user may not even appreciate a program using mlock.

So, maybe this note is not necessary? I think both of the above conditions are pretty much implied when working with a program like this. On the other hand, it can't hurt.