Exporting Signal backups

1. Create a backup with Signal. Be careful – if you delete all your conversations, another two backups will be enough to delete your precious backup file! So move your backup somewhere safe.

2. For exporting the backup, I use the Docker version of signalbackup-tools provided by this repository.

   The Dockerfile has not been updated for a while so you need to change:

   FROM fedora:31
   

   …to:

   FROM fedora:latest
   

   …otherwise compiling signalbackup-tools will fail. At least, it did fail for me.

3. Create the Docker image:

   docker build -t signalbackuptools:latest .
   

4. Create a directory and copy your Signal backup file there. Also, create directories for different export formats. I'll create directories for a raw export, a HTML export and a plain text export:

   mkdir raw html txt
   

5. Run a container with the right parameters.

   Raw export:

   docker run -it -v "$PWD:$PWD" -w "$PWD" signalbackuptools:latest [backup-file] [passphrase] --output raw
   

   HTML export:

   docker run -it -v "$PWD:$PWD" -w "$PWD" signalbackuptools:latest [backup-file] [passphrase] --exporthtml ./html
   

   Plain text export:

   docker run -it -v "$PWD:$PWD" -w "$PWD" signalbackuptools:latest [backup-file] [passphrase] --exporttxt ./txt
   

6. (Optional) In case you're migrating an old but compatible backup, you might need to add the --migratedb parameter to the commands above. Their output will tell you to do it anyway.

   If the backup is too old to be compatible, you can still do a raw export and explore the database using, for instance, sqlitebrowser.