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mollyim / mollyim-android

Enhanced and security-focused fork of Signal.
GNU Affero General Public License v3.0
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Feature request: Online backup (like Google Drive) #224

Open siddhpant opened 8 months ago

siddhpant commented 8 months ago

Is there an existing request for this?

Feature description

Currently, one of the major blocker for adoption of Signal is the database not being backed up online. If your phone is lost or reset, your messages are gone. This is not good for general usage, especially considering "clear app data" is a generic troubleshooting step.

Molly improves upon Signal client so that database can be passphrase protected at rest. Thus, it is possible to securely upload to online cloud storage without much hassle in restoring it later.

WhatsApp allows online backup to Google Drive. They have even introduced passphrase to encrypt your database, so only encrypted database is sent over the wire, and neither Google nor WhatsApp will have access to messages (as they say).

I request for the same feature in Molly.

Applications can upload their own files to Google Drive which cannot be accessed by anyone else (https://developers.google.com/drive/api/guides/appdata).

For FOSS version, maybe Nextcloud could be supported, or have user add an endpoint to which upload should take place.

Silther commented 8 months ago

WhatsApp pays Google and Apple for this Service and doesn't use an android inbuilt feature for it, so I dont't think you can just copy it. I use Signal for many years and never lost my chat history.

siddhpant commented 8 months ago

Well, I must say I'm not much into app dev, but I think upload to Google Drive is done using the free API whose link I posted above. The storage consumed is of the user account. And otherwise, maybe allowing to set the endpoint to upload would be a good option.

Yes, you didn't lose your chats, yet. Of course, you probably have good backup practices, but you cannot expect that from the average user.

PsyNyde commented 8 months ago

why not just use onedrive for syncing to cloud. Google drive also has some 3rd party software to do that also afaik.

jcz1 commented 8 months ago

FYI: https://github.com/seedvault-app/seedvault/wiki/FAQ (Molly seems to be backed-up by Seedvault)