Sorry, I'm not trying to be rude. But I am confused at what they want. We have continued the discussion and the picture is clearer to me. Though I'm not sure exactly how Signal can help with it. It still appears to me that the user wants both reduced storage but to maintain search history, which are at odds with one another. Unless they expect Signal to store their history, which those expectations should be shot down because that is against their core philosophy. I did suggest a hack that might fit their needs (full history on desktop but not phone).

How can you be confused?

'I'd take a decent "export my chats" option' is a very simple statement. There is no way within Signal to just export a whole conversation to a file.

> There is no way within Signal to just export a whole conversation to a file.

You can on Android and Desktop. On Mac see ~/Library/Application\ Support/Signal for your data. The only issue is with iOS which I agree is an issue, but does not seem to be the parent's issue.

No you can't. You can find that info at the OS level, or if you use the beta you could get at it via the Developer tools (since it's just a specialized browser window), but there's no userland option to export your conversation in the application.

That's why I wrote 'within Signal.'

As a simple example of how this could get messy, suppose I wanted to back up all my Signal messages, install a different operating system, install Signal there, and load up my old messages. I do have the IT skills to just find the database file and move it manually, but I'm only confident about that because I know its an SQLite database, where the keys are stored etc.

It's still an IT problem I would prefer not to have, vs the simple option of 'Do you want to export this conversation, with all the security implications Y/N' or 'Import this previously archived conversation?'

GP also said they want to be able to search their chat, however, which I believe is the source of the confusion.

Yes, exactly. It's fair, I was not specific enough with my feature request.

But I think that's what godelski is saying is a bit of a contradiction.

If this "accessible searchable archive" is stored "off of the device", how exactly would the device access and search the archive? Facebook can store your Facebook Chat history on their servers no problem, but E2E encryption makes this much more complicated for Signal!

It's not impossible, Apple does it with iMessage, although that was actually a pretty recent addition despite all of Apple's resources!

> But I think that's what godelski is saying is a bit of a contradiction.

Exactly. I'm saying you can't have both low storage and full chat history. These two cannot work without a storage server. I have suggested a method of using the desktop client as the storage server but I agree that there is no great solution.

> It's not impossible, Apple does it with iMessage

That does come with significant tradeoffs though. Now we have to trust Apple that they haven't taken our keys and that they still aren't handing over this data. It is a tricky situation.