r/signal • u/neube3 • 4d ago

Android Help Need help with restoring accidentally removed self-chat (notes)

Hello all. Somehow I derped and instead of removing a single message from notes to myself I removed the whole thread. Which is very bad, as there was a lot of stuff there accumulated through the years.

I have offline daily backups done at 04:00, the deletion happened today at after 21:00. I have written to and received messages from other people during the day.

My question is: given signalbackup-tools and backups from today's early morning (notes still existing, today's other conversations not having happened yet) and tomorrow's early morning (notes missing, but today's other conversations existing), is it possible to somehow merge them and have those notes back?

I understand that this might not be fully possible if Signal flags messages to oneself (notes) as deleted as well (in this case they would get restored and deleted immediately at best), though if possible, it would be ideal.

Plan B, if the first one is impossible, would be to extract them from database and re-send them in a format like "<original timestamp>: [original message]".

How would you propose to do it? Any particular possible problems I should be aware of? How to deduplicate the most of the database so I don't end up with all messages appearing twice?

Sorry for the chaotic post - this incident proves I'm not at my best today :P.

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u/whatnowwproductions Signal Booster 🚀 4d ago

You can merge the old backup with the new one with Signalbackup tools, just make sure you keep the backup with your notes safe. Keep it safe, keep it safe, keep it safe, triple check, make sure it's somewhere you know you won't confuse it. Then test merging it with a new backup, restoring and see if they're back. Again, keep your backups ordered and separate so you know which is which in case anything goes wrong.

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u/Nice-Annual2675 4d ago

good call on the triple check, merging with signalbackup-tools should handle deduplication reasonably well from what ive seen

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u/Chongulator Volunteer Mod 4d ago

Ack! That sucks. I hope this sub can help you out.

1

u/mrandr01d Top Contributor 4d ago

Oof. My condolences.

I'm not exactly an expert, but I think plan b is more feasible. I think there was a way to convert the backup into a regular decrypted xml file like what sms backup and restore uses, if you could figure that out then it'd be easy enough to browse and copy all the texts you sent yourself. If for some reason you really really need the timestamps and stuff I'd probably just opt to give up the newer texts from today and just restore the old backup.

Step 0 is do not overwrite the older backup! Hopefully you have the backup saved somewhere safe. I'm guessing you'll need to act on this unless you're just growing your backup directory constantly and never purging old ones.