The WhatsApp app is the easiest way to keep in touch with friends, family and colleagues. More than 2,000 million users in the world attest to this. And with so many users, many may have accidentally deleted important WhatsApp messages and not know what to do to get them back. Now the loss can be prevented from being “forever” with the WhatsApp chat recovery feature on both iOS and Android.
Messages are an important part of our lives, and no one wants to be separated from their history. But life is unpredictable, and if you are here it means that you are looking for ways to recover deleted WhatsApp messages. You may have lost them because:
– You went back to the factory settings, losing all the data you had
– You have bought a new smartphone and deleted WhatsApp from the old device
– You accidentally pressed “Delete all chats” in WhatsApp settings
– Your smartphone was lost or broken
Initially we know that in order to recover deleted WhatsApp messages, we need to enable chat backup . WhatsApp offers several backup frequencies in the Automatic Backup zone: daily, weekly, monthly, or disabled. You must remember that the app will only keep the most recent backup file on iOS and the last two backup files on Android.
- Automatic daily backups make it easy to retrieve messages shortly after deletion.
- Weekly automatic backups allow you to go back in time to recover deleted WhatsApp messages from less than seven days ago at the expense of losing recent chat messages.
That is, in essence, we need backup files on the PC or in cloud services to restore deleted WhatsApp messages.
But what if we have the backup disabled?
There are users who decide not to activate the backup of WhatsApp chats offered by Google Drive and, when they need to recover old chats, they think that there is no solution. That all is lost. But the WhatsApp app, by default, always makes a local copy of our conversations. This copy is made daily at night : at 02:00 am . and the files are saved directly to the phone’s internal storage for a week. So if that is the case, you will have at least the possibility of recovering the chats from the last 7 days. You will not be able to retrieve the entire chat history, as it is not possible with this method. Hence, it is always advisable to have backup enabled, no matter how often.
You are determined to restore the messages
You should proceed with extreme caution and follow the steps below to recover deleted WhatsApp messages.
To activate the chat backup, open WhatsApp, go to Settings -> Chats -> click on Chat backup. Here, you can set the frequency of the chat backup between never, daily, weekly or monthly, or you can even do a manual backup as well . In addition, you must select the Google account where you want the backup to be stored.
Restore deleted WhatsApp chats via cloud backup
If you accidentally deleted the conversations, there is a possibility that the chat was present in the cloud backup. How to restore them:
– Uninstall WhatsApp from iPhone Android smartphone.
– Re-install WhatsApp and configure it with your phone number.
– Once the application is configured, you will receive a message asking you to restore the messages from a backup in the cloud. This backup would be from Google Drive on Android and iCloud on iOS. Click on Restore.
– This will return the messages you accidentally deleted. Please note that if you received a message after the most recent cloud backup and deleted it, there is no way to get it back .
Restore deleted WhatsApp chats through local Android backup
Another way to try to restore deleted WhatsApp conversations is to recover them from local phone backups. This method does not work on iOS but it does on Android. Follow these steps:
– Go to the Phone’s File Manager, then to the WhatsApp folder -> Database. The Database folder contains all the WhatsApp backup files that are stored locally on the phone.
– Select the file msgstore.db.crypt12 and rename it msgstore_BACKUP.db.crypt12. This is the most recent backup file and you should rename it to prevent it from being overwritten. In case things go wrong, you can always rename this file to its original name and restore it.
– Now you will see a bunch of files in this folder in the format msgstore-YYYY-MM-DD.1.db.crypt12. These are the previous WhatsApp backups; you can choose the latest one and rename it to msgstore.db.crypt12.
– Now we go to the difficult part: you must open Google Drive on the mobile, touch the icon of the three vertical lines -> Backups. Now delete WhatsApp backup. This will force the phone to restore from the local backup.
– Now, uninstall WhatsApp and reinstall it. Configure it and once this is done, you will receive a message to restore the chats from a local backup, considering that you do not have a backup in the cloud.
– Hit Restore and you’re done. You will recover all your deleted conversations.
