@ada I absolutely did not, because I valued having the data secure only locally, and didn't understand the backup trade-offs. I trusted that the mechanism provided would either work, or fail gracefully. It never occurred to me that it would happily purge all data without confirmation of successful transfer. Since that failure mode is clearly very well known to the developers, the app should have screamed that at the user in all caps, prior to requiring double confirmation to move forward.

So if you initiate the phone-to-phone Signal account transfer process, and it almost completes, such that the account is transferred, but the data isn't, and then errors out ... and if you didn't have backups enabled ... then your entire chat history just vanishes into thin air with zero recourse. In other words, Signal nukes your history from orbit on the old phone before validating that it actually successfully transferred to the new phone.

I am indescribably angry right now.

(The extra insurance you need, that I didn't have, was to enable general backups on the old phone first, and make sure that a backup completes on the old phone before initiating the transfer.)

#Signal

"Let us be the repository of your passkeys" and "We may terminate your account at any time and permanently refuse to communicate with you" ... seems like a bad combination?