Well, it happened. I almost lost my entire Signal chat history. Granted, I have only been using Signal as my main messaging app for just a couple of months, but losing the chat history was something that I wanted to avoid.

Since I first installed the app I found out that I needed to enable chat backups to be able to recover the messages, so I instantly set it up and saved the recovery passphrase in a safe place… Or so I thought! Turns out I apparently mistyped the numbers when saving them, I didn’t know of KDE Connect at the time so I had to manually type it on my PC. Fast forward to a couple of days ago when I did a factory reset on my phone. I carefully copied everything from the phone before the wipe, including the Signal Backups. Then I tried to recover said backups.

All the messages, lost.

I tried to enter the passphrase at least four times before I gave up. They were lost. I could still access the messages from the desktop client on my PC, but after looking online for ways to recover messages from the desktop client to the mobile app, even if it may be possible to recover messages from a PC, the methods seemed way too complex and time consuming for the three months of (non important) messages.

I was just going to give up.

But then I remembered something. I remembered that I had also installed an alternate Signal client called Molly on a secondary phone, taking advantage of Molly’s ability to link an android device with your main phone. I went to the Molly app and saw that it still had all the messages. However, just like the desktop client, it was unlinked from the main phone. With a slimmer of hope I looked in the settings menu to find the chat backup option. To my surprise the button was not grayed out. I proceded to use it, and after checking the passphrase multiple times I copied that backup to my main phone running the normal Signal client.

It worked!

After inserting the new passphrase correctly all my messages started coming back. So yes, according to my testing you can import a Molly backup in the normal Signal client and use it to recover a lost chat backup. Why doesn’t the desktop client have this function? I could not tell you.