A replacement for SeedVault is planned:

https://grapheneos.org/features#encrypted-backups

https://github.com/GrapheneOS/os-issue-tracker/issues/4687#i...

> the project has been taken over by another group of people not sharing our goals or approach

> Seedvault which was originally written for use in GrapheneOS by a GrapheneOS user is a consequence of the 2018 takeover attempt on the project, which the people currently in defacto control of Seedvault were heavily involved in.

Seedvault is currently maintained by the CalyxOS team but I've never heard about this stuff. Does anybody know what happened?

There has been a lot of conflict between Calyx and GrapheneOS a while ago.

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Yeah, it's planned for years and years at this point.

Sure I know there are more urgent priorities but at the moment there is no backup for GOS phones. It only works for some people in some situations. For me it never reliably worked, ever.

Neat, I didn't realize it was still included. I thought it had been abandonned.

So basically one needs a webdav server somewhere or an usb flash drive.

The problem is that most apps opt out of backup, so it's effectively useless.

Yeah I don't even understand why this is even a thing. It should be user's choice, not app vendor/developer's choice.

Android 12 changed the meaning of allowBackup="false" to opting out of cloud backups. GrapheneOS encrypted backups use the device-to-device transfer mode which includes apps opted out of cloud backups. It's similar to the Google Play data transfer feature, not Google's backup system.

Android 12 changed the meaning of allowBackup="false" to opting out of cloud backups. GrapheneOS encrypted backups use the device-to-device transfer mode which includes apps opted out of cloud backups. It's similar to the Google Play data transfer feature, not Google's backup system.

That still doesn't prevent other means that developers have to thwart backups. Chrome and vanadium has a custom backup agent that only dumps out settings, so browsing history and bookmarks aren't backed up at all. I believe firefox is similar unless they changed something recently. Same goes for other apps like signal. Browsers, messengers, and camera are the top 3 categories of apps I use on my phone, and the built-in backup gets 1/3 of them (camera actually works because it's just regular internal storage). That's not very good coverage.

Vanadium will add more data to the device-to-device backups but we haven't gotten to it yet.

For Signal, you can set up their own backups locally and they'll be included with backed up home directory data if that's enabled. Signal encrypts their database and encrypts the key used for it with the hardware keystore. A generic backup system can't back that up directly. The encrypted database is useless outside of the current app install since the hardware keystore key can't be exported.

I use Seedvault to create a backup locally on my phone, and then sync it to my backup server with Syncthing

I use local seedvault backup and then sync via round sync daily trigger to my Nextcloud WebDav Server (native seedvault was not able to use this, for some reason).

It's been planned for years...

TTS has also been planned for a while and they released it recently. Donating or helping out is going to do more than complaining on HN.

TTS is also in the process of being massively improved. What we've included is only an initial bare minimum implementation. We also plan to add speech-to-text but we may only support using existing models for it since it's harder and a model doesn't need to be bundled with the OS for accessibility.

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