Sign introduces free and paid backup plans to your chats | TechCrunch

Privateness-focused messaging app Sign introduced on Monday that it’s introducing a characteristic that permits customers to again up their textual content conversations free of charge, together with the final 45 days of media. It’s additionally debuting its first paid characteristic by providing full media backups with as much as 100GB of storage.

Traditionally, the messaging app didn’t let customers retailer any form of backup of your conversations on the platform. This might be particularly troublesome in the event you misplaced or broke your telephone. When you might switch conversations from one telephone to a different, there was no cloud backup in place. The brand new characteristic lastly solves that downside, making Sign a extra helpful app for safe messaging.

Sign’s free tier offers customers 100MB of storage for textual content messages and the final 45 days’ price of media. The corporate mentioned in its weblog submit that it shops messages after compressing them, and 100MB could be ample for “even heavy” customers.

For customers who need to retailer past the final 45 days of media, the corporate is providing a $1.99 per thirty days paid plan with 100GB of storage.

That is Sign’s first paid characteristic, and the corporate mentioned it’s charging customers to help with the price of storage in a privacy-preserving method.

You may allow the safe backup characteristic from the app’s Settings, which can then start to again up your content material every day.

Sign is utilizing zero-knowledge know-how to safe its backups, so that they’re not linked to a selected consumer or a particular cost technique. Customers will obtain a 64-character restoration key that’s generated on the machine to unlock their backups. Amid Sign rivals, WhatsApp gives end-to-end backup by an elective characteristic that customers must allow.

At launch, Sign is providing this characteristic solely on the beta model of its Android app, however mentioned that cross-platform availability is coming quickly. It famous that, sooner or later, it plans to let customers save a backup archive wherever they need. Plus, it intends to allow customers to switch their message historical past between platforms.