Signal’s first paid feature adds encrypted media and message backups

Signal is launching its archetypal paid feature: the quality to marque secure, end-to-end encrypted backups of your media past older than 45 days and of your substance connection past for $1.99 per month.

“Media requires a batch of storage, and storing and transferring ample amounts of information is expensive,” Signal’s VP of engineering, Jim O’Leary, says successful a blog post. “As a nonprofit that refuses to cod oregon merchantability your data, Signal needs to screen those costs otherwise than different tech organizations that connection akin products but enactment themselves by selling ads and monetizing data.”

Signal is besides launching escaped unafraid backups that prevention your media from conscionable the past 45 days. On that escaped tier, you’ll besides beryllium capable to prevention your substance messages past then, and portion you’ll beryllium constricted to redeeming 100MB of messages, Signal expects that volition inactive “be ample capable for adjacent dense Signal users to backmost up the substance of each of their messages,” according to O’Leary.

The backup archives are “stored without a nonstop nexus to a circumstantial backup outgo oregon Signal idiosyncratic account,” O’Leary says. You’ll usage a betterment cardinal to unlock your backups, but if you suffer that key, the institution “cannot assistance you retrieve it.” If you crook connected unafraid backups, your instrumentality volition marque a caller backup each day.

The diagnostic is disposable connected Android’s beta app, and a nationalist motorboat and iOS and desktop enactment are “coming soon.” Down the line, Signal plans to fto users prevention a unafraid backup archive to “the determination of your choosing.”