I need the ability to recover the account/profile following a complete loss of all hardware devices I own. What do I need to back up - preferably as an encrypted .tar archive squirreled somewhere on the net - in order to reinstate the account/profile on a replacement device(s)? Please note I am only interested in the ability to recover the account/profile, NOT the past message content or list of correspondents.
TIA
All you need is a backup from Settings → Chats → Export Backup. It also contains your messages and contacts.
You’ll have to care for encryption yourself though.
You can use the export backup feature already implemented.
If you find the file too large to handle, you need to prune the zip manually. You can remove past messages, xdc state updates, attachments, but not your avatar and then vacuum the database file with a few SQL commands.
This doesn’t have to be manual. One may add another device and then delete older messages with Settings → Chats → Delete old messages from device. Then export the backup.
Well, the shortest interval here in my client is After 1 hour. While this may seem good enough for all practical purposes, am I supposed to wait 1 hour for it to clear up fully for the above use case?
Does DC execute full vacuuming before each export? Past experience showed that an sql dump and then recreation of the database usually resulted in a smaller database overall.