Does it have export?

Signal's complete inability to any kind of history backup is a dealbreaker for me.

Element has. The app on the other side

I think it's unlikely that this chatbox has export functionality

With E2EE I don't think you can even implement a reliable export on the server side.

It seems like Element is limited to only exporting a single room, though. You need something like https://gitlab.com/argit/matrix-recorder/ to export all messages, it seems.

> With E2EE I don't think you can even implement a reliable export on the server side.

Can't you use your client key(s)?

The client would have to fetch all your messages first. Some rooms can have thousands of messages a day, and some people are in thousands of rooms [1] (though these are core developers so they might be stress testing)

[1]: https://hackertimes.com/item?id=32021303

but you would hopefully not export all messages every time? incremental?

If you wanted automated exports I think an easier way would be to host your own homeserver, and create your account on that homeserver. I believe any messages in any rooms you join will be synced with your homeserver, and you can perform automated full backups (or maybe incremental backups if the database supports it?)

> Element has. The app on the other side

Which is currently broken and has been for some time. If you export a room, images will not show in the final exported chat.

Just because there's no "official" way to access history as a client in Signal doesn't mean the history isn't there. You'd have to ask that "Moxie Marlinspike" or whatever his name is fella.