Frequently asked questions

signal-back uses huge amounts of memory! I'm getting "out of memory" issues all the time!

This is known. It's being worked on.

All my non-Latin characters are garbled!

If you're using Windows, this is probably because you've used the piping command (> backup.xml) instead of writing directly to the backup (-o backup.xml). The reason for this is that the Windows terminal doesn't correctly handle Unicode characters, so things get a bit messed up.

The solution is to either specify the output file with the -o flag, or use the Out-File Powershell cmdlet and specify the encoding (from #28):

.\signal-back_windows_amd64.exe format -f XML .\signal.backup | out-file "backup.xml" -encoding oem

Why is my decrypted XML backup larger than the encrypted one?

In simple terms, the XML version contains a lot of labels for the backup data that the encrypted one doesn't. Since these labels have to be applied on every single SMS/MMS, the extra space those labels take up add up. The encrypted version doesn't have these labels and just trusts that the app reading it knows how the data fits. There is no way around this.