If you have an Android phone, yes, I suppose you can backup. But I don't.
There's no backup procedure for iOS. There's a migration, but the phone you're migrating from has to be working at the time. So if it's destroyed, you're SOL. Also, it's really buggy and has never worked every time I've seen it attempted.
The desktop instructions do not describe a backup. If you try to copy your old data over to a new machine in an attempt to preserve your chat history, you will break things. The procedure doesn't describe how to make things work, but rather how to unhose things once Signal has prevented you from doing what you want and blown up in your face to punish you. There is a way to export from the Desktop client, but it involves using sqlcipher and is an undocumented, unsupported, discouraged hack.
There's no backup procedure for iOS. There's a migration, but the phone you're migrating from has to be working at the time. So if it's destroyed, you're SOL. Also, it's really buggy and has never worked every time I've seen it attempted.
The desktop instructions do not describe a backup. If you try to copy your old data over to a new machine in an attempt to preserve your chat history, you will break things. The procedure doesn't describe how to make things work, but rather how to unhose things once Signal has prevented you from doing what you want and blown up in your face to punish you. There is a way to export from the Desktop client, but it involves using sqlcipher and is an undocumented, unsupported, discouraged hack.