Matthias Balk/picture alliance via Getty Images Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. ZDNET's takeaways Privacy-centric messaging app Signal has a message backup option. The free tier stores up to 45 days of messages. You can pay $1.99 a month if you want to store more than 45 days. Signal is offering its first-ever backup option. In a post Monday, the security-focused messaging app company announced a new feature that lets you back up your messages for free. In the past, Signal explained, if you lost your phone, your Signal history was lost too. If you have important conversations like photos, messages from friends, it's easy to see how that can be frustrating. That's why Signal is giving you a way to get those messages back. Also: The best secure browsers for privacy in 2025: Expert tested The new feature is called Secure Backups. It refreshes every day and lets you save your conversations in an end-to-end encrypted "privacy-preserving form," Signal said. Secure Backups are opt-in. If you don't want to use the feature, you don't have to. However, whoever you're chatting with could be using the feature, so your messages may be saved in their storage even if you opt out. You get 100MiB of storage for free and can back up and access your previous 45 days of messages and media at any time. Signal noted that messages are compressed when archived, so the free storage should be enough for the majority of users. If you want to go beyond 45 days, you can utilize a paid plan that's $1.99 a month – the company's first-ever paid feature. The company explained that it waited until now to roll out a paid feature because media requires a lot of storage, and storing and transferring large amounts of data is expensive. Signal added that, "as a nonprofit that refuses to collect or sell your data," it has to cover those costs in a different way (not selling ads or monetizing data). How secure is Signal Secure Backups? Signal said that a 64-character recovery key is at the center of your backup security. This key is never shared with Signal's servers, and it's the only way to "unlock" your backup if you need to do so. If you lose that key, your backups are gone for good as well. Signal recommends writing this key down or storing it in a secure password manager. To take security a step further, backups are stored without a direct link to the user account or to a specific backup payment. Also: How VPNs are helping people evade increased censorship - and much more All of this means that Signal is staying true to its privacy-first mission but still adding features people have come to expect from messaging apps. Secure backups are available for users of the latest beta version of the app on Android now. Access on all other platforms is coming soon.