They won't let you decide where the backup goes. I have a huge, almost empty SD card that I bought specifically to back up my data onto, but since you can't choose the save location you're limited to whatever free space exists in the phone's itneral storage. The only way I can back up my Signal data would be if I uninstalled everything else from my phone, in which case I might have enough space.

And I don't want it only as an encrypted blob to bring back into Signal though of course that option should be available. I would actually like the abilityt o export it in a format of my choosing.

> They won't let you decide where the backup goes.

I don't think so. At some point I setup my Signal to send backups to (I think) the "/Signal/Backups2" directory on my phone. My phone doesn't support SD cards, so there may be some quirk with those, but I definitely had some control.

> And I don't want it only as an encrypted blob to bring back into Signal though of course that option should be available. I would actually like the abilityt o export it in a format of my choosing.

That's a nice to have, but it's totally reasonable for them not to support a bunch of random formats someone might like, but hardly anyone would ever use.

If you want a different format, just write a converter. It wouldn't be very hard. The backup is literally an encrypted SQLite DB, and there's a command-line decryptor available (if you have your key).

I'm looking at it right now and you can see the folder it's saved to, but there is no way to change it. The Desktop version doesn't include any backup option at all.

The backup is literally an encrypted SQLite DB

I know this, but they don't exactly make any effort to tell you. While I agree that they can't support every possible format they could certainly offer CSV, JSON, and SQLite.