Signal Solves Its Biggest Flaw with a New Privacy-Focused Cloud Backup

Signal has announced a privacy-focused cloud backup feature, introducing a zero-knowledge architecture to protect user data, with the rollout starting on Android and iOS to follow. For free accounts, it stores up to 45 days of messages and media, with older content automatically purged from servers but remaining available locally on the device, and a storage limit of 100MB.

Paid subscribers can pay 1.99 dollars per month to access 100GB of encrypted cloud storage for long-term preservation of chat histories and multimedia. When the backup is activated, the device generates a unique 64-character recovery key to decrypt the archive, and Signal does not retain this key, meaning lost keys render the backups permanently inaccessible.

Signal has historically avoided cloud backups due to privacy concerns, and the change marks its shift towards offering cloud storage while aiming to keep data indecipherable to anyone but the user. The feature will eventually allow users to select alternative storage providers for added flexibility. The announcement was published on 9 September 2025.