Even automatic backups run at intervals to cause less server load. The article says you absolutely have to write down your restore key too (They say notebook or PW manager).

It may seem obvious now, but I know most people will forget and be puzzled if their phone suffers physical damage. A lot about this has mandatory manual steps.

I think you misunderstand. Any backup that requires a manual step every time a backup is created is not a backup. A backup that requires some one-time manual setup, like recording a restore key, is fine.

Yes, there are some people who will forget to do that, or just lose the restore key, but that's the security/usability trade off.

Thought people are talking about backups without a "cloud" involved. So you'd need to manually connect your phone to something...

Wireguard + syncthing (from F-Droid) work fine. Triggering it when the phone is on the charger makes it very easy to sync things from a computer to the phone, while next to the computer.

To be clear, Signal + Syncthing also works fine, that's what I have.

It absolutely does not work fine. Keeping 2x the size of my database in free space on my phone in free space to let backups work it's no solution at all, which is why I stopped doing it. (The backup creates two files - current and previous, and Syncthing can't remove complete files to another location, so you need an actually rather difficult to write script to do it).

I see. I was talking about Syncthing in general, not about the specific way of backing up Signal.

I never really grokked Syncthing.

I recently vibe-coded a crappy Windows Go GUI to grab files off my phone via rclone & sshd4a and then optionally delete them, but it's a very manual process since sshd4a has to be running on the phone before I initiate the pull.

Syncthing is just open source Dropbox, self hosted.

It's entire purpose is "make two folders identical".

It's very good at that: so good that I frequently wish it did other things - i.e. if it had some notion of minimum seeding levels so it would destage files off a device provided they were replicated elsewhere (e.g. automatically clearing old photos off your phone would be a good use of it).

Yeah, I think I was just trying to get it to do something it wasn't suited for!

What? My phone has a perfectly working 802.11 chipset, which is able to talk to my very own machines that are not in a cloud, no manual connection needed. This is purely a software/ecosystem issue.

Imagine we could run the backup server backend self-hosted and FLOSS. Like Vaultwarden, the upstream bitwarden client API.