Jailbreaking the iPhone was out of the question since my version of iOS had not been jailbreaken.

And since migrating from Android to iOS isn’t possible, part of our conversation history was locked on my old phone. Since we started dating, I had switched from a OnePlus 2 to an iPhone XS Max. At some point, I thought it would be nice to export our conversation history – a sort of time capsule of our relationship. Shortly after we started dating, I asked my partner to switch to Signal, and we’ve used it exclusively ever since. In recent years, I moved most of my conversations to Signal, including those with family and close friends. What's paradoxical is that someone else's phone turned out to be the key to my data.

The road to exporting my data was long, frustrating and filled with dead ends – it took over a year to get here. Meanwhile, decrypting messages from the desktop client is trivial, but linking one’s phone and desktop client only syncs messages forward in time. At the same time, iOS users can migrate their data to a new device (as long as their phone number hasn’t changed), but this is impossible on Android. However, backup and migration policies differ for each official Signal client and sometimes contradict each other.įor example, while iOS offers no official backups process, Android backups are built into the app. The Signal team insists these restrictions are meant to protect users’ privacy. Signal makes it very difficult, and in most cases, impossible, for one to back up, export, or migrate message data. Around the same time, I closed my Facebook and Instagram accounts, and later, my Google Account. If you'd only like to download a specific item type (such as all SMSs), just specify the -item-types argument.I started using Signal 5 years ago as I became increasingly conscious of my data footprint. Locally and that has the same file size locally as inīy default, the tool will download everything in a backup. keep-existing Do not download files that has already been downloaded Limit files to those within a specific application Include address_book, calendar, sms, call_history, itunes-style Save the files in a flat iTunes-style backup, with Newest backup, with -1 being the newest, -2 second, Negative numbers will indicate relative position from

snapshot SNAPSHOT Only download data the snapshot with the specified ID. combined Do not separate each snapshot into its own folder threads THREADS Download thread pool size

h, -help Show this help message and exit.

Iphone backup extractor github