I am using the messenger Signal and bought a FP4 recently. From my old phone I wanted to transfer the account to the new FP.
I installed Signal from the Aurora store and I could do the transfer. It took a while but it worked, I think.
But I cannot open Signal on the new phone anymore, it is crashing.
Unfortunately I have not done a backup of the data in signal before because I did not know this is possible. I thought with the transfer I will move my data. I also deleted singal on the old phone already.
Does anyone know how I could solve the crash but keep my data? Or how I can store the data somewhere else? Then I would do a deinstallation/reinstallation of signal.
The support from Signal is not very helpful unfortunately…
How did you transfer the data when you did not use the back-up function? To my knowledge no back-up no way to have the messages from your old on the new phone
You could try to delete the Apps cache under settings- apps- signal
I did this once with restoring Signal’s files via TitaniumBackup (or any other similar app) and I failed in the same way as you describe it.
The local storage of Signal cannot be migrated on a file basis: You definitely need to do a backup, store the recovery key and put the backup files onto the new phone. Once you start Signal it will give you an option to restore the messages from your backup. To my knowledge there is no other way to migrate Signal messages from one phone to another.
Do you have your old phone still at hand? If yes, you could run a backup within Signal, still. The transfer the backup file (it should be in /sdcard/Signal/) and put it in your new phone in the same location. The delete all app data on your new phone and start Signal from Scratch. During the first start it will show an option to restore a backup. With the restore key (!) you kept somewhere you can restore the backup on your new phone.
You can transfer the data directly when you fresh install the app. Then you have to put the 2 phones next to each other with Bluetooth and Wlan enabled. This also worked. My data is on the new phone - at least I assume that since my memory is booked for Signal.
But after the successful transfer I cannot start Signal anymore.
Unfortunately I have not done a backup before I started the transfer from one phone to the other. That was a mistake. But how should I know that Signal will crash afterwards. I was confident the transfer will worke properly.
I deleted Signal on the old phone because it was part of the description from the Signal support page and I was not sure if that might be the reason why I cannot open it on the new phone.
This means my data is only on the new phone where Signal crashes which means I cannot do a backup from Signal.
Do you think I could get the data by doing a backup via TitaniumBackup? And afterwards deinstall and reinstall Signal?
No, you won’t be able to restore the data without the encrypted backup from within Signal. At least I did not find any solution to do that, back then.
In my opinion the only thing you could try, is transfer the data back to your old phone (if you still have it unchanged from before starting with the new phone) and reinstall Signal there and then follow the migration path, Signal proposes. Due to the encryption of the Signal data there is hardly a way to access the data. That is the design and purpose of Signal.
I just did what you descibed, got a new fp4 phone, got signal from aurora, moved data from old phone via local transfer. Works fine.
I know this will not help you, but at least others can know that this may be an isolated case.
Btw, in my first phone move, when i had not done research i lost all conversations. That was not soo bad, after a week or so it’s forgotten. I mean you could just delete and re-install signal and hope that works.
Might be, but I discovered that Aurora Store updated apps sometimes crash, because the app update didn’t go completely. Thus I also have APKPure, where I never discovered such problems when updating APPS
I had no time to go deeper into this the last days. Today I searched for a backup app because you and also other people suggested to try to backup Signal from the new phone and restore it on the old phone.
Now, I am wondering which backup app is useful. I checked Titanium which was recommended but it needs a rooted smartphone and I think I don’t want to do that.
Can you recommend another one which does not need a root and that can back up to a SD card?
That is also my feeling that the app did not get installed properly from the Aurora Store. I cannot tell if that is a thing that might happen more often or not. I used the Aurora Store the first time.
I was talking about Signal’s own backup. Any other backup tool will fail (Titanium Backup, NeoBackup, SwiftBackup).
The reason is, that Signal encrypts its storage and restoring data will brake this encryption .
I wrote before: The only way to restore your messages is to backup those on your old phone, transfer the backup and restore it within Signal on your new phone during first start of Signal.
