How do you retrieve deleted whatsapp chats
How to Recover Deleted WhatsApp Messages
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Over the past few years, WhatsApp has established itself as the go-to social media platform, helping people connect with friends and family. One feature that endeared users is being able to send or receive an unlimited number of messages that don’t autodelete, as happens with some other social media platforms.
However, WhatsApp allows you to delete the messages you don’t want to keep. This option means there’s a possibility of deleting something accidentally. You might also lose your messages inadvertently, for example, when switching to a new device or even while resetting your device.
But does that mean you lose those messages forever? The answer is no. If you have accidentally deleted messages from your WhatsApp account, there is still a chance to recover them.
How to Recover Deleted WhatsApp Messages
If you’re an avid WhatsApp user, there’s a good chance you’ve had the unfortunate experience of losing some of your messages. It could be a funny text from a friend, contact information shared with you by a colleague, or even an exchange you could present as evidence in court.
Although WhatsApp doesn’t provide a direct built-in tool to help you retrieve deleted messages, you can still recover them in several ways. However, recovery methods generally depend on the type of device you’re using. For example, what works for Android devices may not work for iPhones.
First, let’s dive in and see how to recover your old WhatsApp messages on an Android device.
Recover Deleted WhatsApp Messages using Android
Android devices often get praised for their affordability, large display, open-source programs (which makes them highly customizable), and an incredible app selection in the Google Play Store. It’s no wonder that most Android devices today are fully compatible with WhatsApp.
But as with other devices, you can lose your WhatsApp data in a matter of seconds. Losing your data can happen if you accidentally hit the “delete” button or switch to a new device.
Luckily, WhatsApp comes equipped with a cloud-based backup solution that can save the day if you lose your messages and want to retrieve them. But how exactly does it work?
Once you’ve enabled backup in the settings section of your WhatsApp account, the app starts to store copies of all your messages in WhatsApp’s servers at regular intervals. When a backup process begins, the app checks for message duplicates on its server. If it doesn’t find one, a copy gets created immediately. The app also saves any new photos or videos automatically.
Therefore, your backup should be the first place you look when you delete a message accidentally.
Note: To see if your messages are backing up, go to Settings>Chats>Chat Backup. Then, verify that the email listed is one that you can access.
Here’s how to recover deleted WhatsApp messages on an Android device when you’ve backed up your data:
- Delete WhatsApp from your device.
- Download and install a new copy of WhatsApp from Google Play.
- After installation, open WhatsApp and enter your details, including your name and number.
- During installation, a prompt will appear on your screen asking whether you’d like to
Restore your chats from your Google Drive. Tap on Restore to initiate the recovery process. - After recovering your data, follow the on-screen instructions to complete the installation.
All your old messages and media should now be available in your chats.
Recover Deleted WhatsApp Messages on an iPhone
Like Android, the WhatsApp application for iPhones supports backup to the cloud at regular intervals. So long as your backup is enabled, WhatsApp will store copies of all your messages in the iCloud Drive. You can even see when the last backup was performed by opening the settings section of your account.
Recovering deleted messages from iCloud is straightforward:
- Uninstall WhatsApp from your device by choosing Delete App.
- Visit the App Store and download a new copy of WhatsApp.
- After downloading the app successfully, install it on your device.
- Follow the on-screen instructions to recover all the deleted messages.
Now, WhatsApp displays all your deleted messages in your chat.
It’s crucial to ensure enough space in your local storage before the recovery process starts. As a rule of thumb, the available local storage should be twice as much as the size of your backup. For example, if your backup is 1 GB, there should be at least 2 GB of free storage space on your device.
How to Recover Deleted WhatsApp Messages without a Backup
Although data recovery from your WhatsApp backup is fast and convenient, you may have forgotten to enable it when setting up your account.
The good news is that you can still recover lost messages and media thanks to your device’s local backup or third-party software.
Recover Deleted WhatsApp Messages without a Backup on Android Devices
Apart from cloud-based backup, all Android devices come with Android Local Backup—the default data backup service for many Android devices.
The application typically gets included in nearly every new Android smartphone with Google Mobile Services (a collection of Google apps that help support functionality across devices).
If you haven’t enabled cloud backup on your WhatsApp account, you can still recover the data stored in your device’s local backup. Here’s how to go about it:
- Open your device’s File Manager and tap on WhatsApp.
- Select the Database folder.
- Look for a file named msgstore.db.crypt12 and change its name to msgstore_BACKUP.db.crypt12 without quotes.
- After that, look for the file named msgstore-YYYY-MM-DD.1.db.crypt12 and rename it to msgstore.db.crypt12 without quotes.
- Now, delete WhatsApp from your device, download a new copy from the Google Play store, and install it.
- Since you don’t have any files backed up in the cloud, you get prompted to restore your chats from the local phone backup.
Tap on Restore to initiate the recovery process.
Now, you can view most deleted messages in your chats.
The downside to this local backup method is that you can only recover the most recent messages. That’s because the amount of backup space available for each app is limited.
Recover Deleted WhatsApp Messages without a Backup on iPhone
If you run WhatsApp on iOS and cloud backup isn’t enabled, you can only recover deleted messages via a third-party tool.
Although there are several options to choose from, MiniTool Mobile Recovery for iOS stands out because it doesn’t require you to uninstall WhatsApp.
Here’s how to use it:
- Download and install MiniTool Mobile Recovery for iOS on your PC.
- Connect your phone to your PC via a suitable USB cable.
- Launch MiniTool Mobile Recovery for iOS on your PC.
- Click on Scan to initiate a thorough search through all the social media and communication apps installed on your iPhone.
- At this point, select WhatsApp from the menu displayed on the left side of your screen. All messages, including the ones that got deleted, should appear.
- Select the messages you’d like to recover and then hit the Recover button in the lower right corner.
In closing, WhatsApp is a great way to communicate with your friends and family. Regardless, there can be moments when you accidentally delete messages or lose them while switching devices. If this happens to you, don’t panic. You now have multiple ways to recover the deleted messages and view or share them as you like, whether you had backups enabled in WhatsApp or not. Give the above options a try!
WhatsApp Message Recovery FAQs
Does WhatsApp keep your messages?
When you delete a message on WhatsApp, it disappears. However, it isn’t gone forever. Your messages get stored in the cloud (Google Drive or iCloud). They also get stored on your device.
For these reasons, you can recover your deleted WhatsApp messages even if you need a third-party service.
I reinstalled the app, but none of my messages appeared. What’s happening?
When you follow the instructions above to uninstall the app and reinstall it, you must log in to the correct account. Using a different email, phone, or phone number is the likely culprit of your missing messages.
As shown above, open the WhatsApp Settings and tap on Chats. Then tap on Chat Backup. You can verify the last time WhatsApp saved your chats and the email address associated with that backup.
How to Retrieve Accidentally Deleted Conversations
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The WhatsApp app is the easiest way to keep in touch with friends, family, and colleagues. Its popularity has grown over the year and more than 2 billion users worldwide attest to this.
Many of these users have accidentally deleted important messages from WhatsApp, at some point or another, and don’t know what to do to get them back. Now you can prevent losing these messages for good with WhatsApp's chat recovery feature on both iOS and Android.
How can you lose your messages:
- You reset your phone to factory settings, losing all the data you had
- You bought a new smartphone and deleted WhatsApp from your old device
- You accidentally pressed "Clear all chats" in the WhatsApp configuration
- Your smartphone was lost or broken
First things first, before you do anything the easiest way to recover lost messages is to back up your chats. WhatsApp offers several backup frequencies in the Automatic Backup area: daily, weekly, monthly, or off. 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 recover messages shortly after deletion.
Weekly automatic backups allow you to go back in time to recover WhatsApp deleted messages from less than seven days ago at the expense of losing recent chat messages.
In other words, you need a few backup files on the PC or in cloud services to restore WhatsApp deleted messages.
But what happens if your backup is turned off?
Some users choose not to turn on the backup of WhatsApp chats offered by Google Drive, and when they need to recover old chats, they think there is no solution. That all is lost. But the WhatsApp app, by default, always makes a local copy of our chats. That copy is made daily at night: at 2:00 a.m. and the files are stored directly on the phone's internal storage for a week. So if that's the case, you will have at least the possibility to retrieve the chats of the last 7 days. You will not be able to retrieve the entire chat history, as this method is not possible. That's why it's always advisable to have your backup enabled, no matter how often.
You're determined to restore the messages
You should proceed with extreme caution and follow the steps below to retrieve deleted messages from WhatsApp.
To enable chat backup, open WhatsApp, go to Settings -> Chats -> click on Chat Backup. Here, you can set the frequency of chat backup between never, daily, weekly or monthly, or you can even do a manual backup as well. In addition, you will need to select the Google Account where you would like the backup to be stored.
Restore Chats deleted from WhatsApp via Cloud Backup
If you have deleted the conversations accidentally, there is a possibility that the chat was present in the cloud backup. Here’s how to restore them:
- Uninstall WhatsApp from the iPhone Android smartphone.
- Reinstall 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 cloud backup.
This backup would be from Google Drive on Android and iCloud on iOS. Click Restore.
- This will return the messages you accidentally deleted. Please note that if you received a message after the most recent cloud backup and you deleted it, there's no way to recover it.
Restoring Chats Deleted from WhatsApp via Android Local Backup
Another way to attempt to restore conversations deleted from WhatsApp is to retrieve them from local phone backups. This method does not work on iOS but does work on Android. Please follow these steps:
- Go to your phone's File Manager, then to the WhatsApp -> Database folder. 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 to 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 lot of files in this folder with the format msgstore-YYYY-MM-DD.1.db.crypt12. These are older WhatsApp backups; you can choose the most recent one and rename it to msgstore.db.crypt12.
- Now for the hard part: you need to open Google Drive on your phone, touch the three vertical lines icon -> Backups. Now delete the backup from WhatsApp. This will force the phone to restore from the local backup.
- Now, uninstall WhatsApp and reinstall it. Configure it and once you have done this, you will receive a message to restore your chats from a local backup, considering that you do not have a cloud backup.
- Hit Restore and you're done. You'll get all your deleted chats back.
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How to restore WhatsApp chat on Android in 2022
Recently, issues related to the security of the WhatsApp messenger have been discussed more and more often.
However, he did not lose his popularity because of this, but on the contrary: during the pandemic, WhatsApp became one of several social networks that replaced live communication for people. Many users do not delete chats on purpose, keeping them as an important source of information with data, photos. This allows you not to clutter up the phone's memory, as well as sort them. But what if the correspondence was deleted and the backup was not done for a very long time? Consider the 4 most popular and affordable ways in which you will find information about how to recover deleted chat in whatsapp .
- Method 1: Restore Whatsapp chat using third party software
- Method 2. How to recover a deleted chat in WhatsApp
- Method 3. Restore Whatsapp Chat via Google
- Method 4. Restore chat in WhatsApp without linking to Google
Method 1: Restore Whatsapp chat using third party software
Tenorshare UltData WhatsApp Recovery is a modern utility that has been developed for such cases - an urgent need to restore message history without using backups.
The program has a high level of reliability, it is easy to use and has an intuitive interface. It is compatible with almost all devices on Android / iOS operating systems. nine0005
In order to help you restore the WhatsApp chat as soon as possible, we have developed a small guide.
- Download Tenorshare UltData WhatsApp Recovery and install it on your computer.
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When the installation is completed, an active window will appear on the desktop with all the functions that it offers. We, in this case, are interested in the "Restore WhatsApp Data" button.
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Connect your device with a cable to a PC. nine0005
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The program will request a special setting to synchronize with the device. It will take some time.
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The utility has detected your device. Now you can go to the next screen. To do this, press the "Start" key, which will start searching for deleted WhatsApp data on your device.
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Then log into your account.
If you've already done so, click "Yes, I want to continue." Once the backup issue is resolved, Tenorshare UltData for Android will run a scan to detect data on your smartphone. nine0005 -
Upon completion of the operation, all found data will appear on the screen, including deleted chats and messages. Choose what you would like to return, then click the "Restore" button.
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The operation was successfully completed if the following icon appears on the screen.
Method 2. How to recover a deleted chat in WhatsApp
How can I restore WhatsApp chats, apart from the method using third-party software? There are several options that can quickly solve your problem. One of them is implemented right inside the application. It's about message forwarding. nine0005
When you chat, the conversation is stored on two devices. If at the time of deletion, data was erased from only one device, then they most likely remained on another. This is true for those who have lost data by accident.
For example, when buying a new smartphone. Chat Forward Instruction:
- Make sure the other party has saved the data;
- You must then select the message to be sent. To do this, pinch and hold your finger on it for a long time. It will be highlighted when a checkmark appears on the left. You can select as many messages as you like; nine0008
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In the upper right corner you will see an arrow to the right, clicking on which will open the contact list. From it, a person is selected who will receive the selected messages;
- If you want to send the whole chat at once, then open the settings in the application and find the chats tab;
- Next, go to "chat history" and "export chats";
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Select the chat you want to forward and click send.
This method is only suitable if your interlocutor has not deleted the information. Otherwise, it will be impossible to return the chat inside the application. nine0005
Method 3.
Restore Whatsapp chat via Google If the second method also does not help you, how to restore chat in WhatsApp, then try this method. The most reliable way to store information in the messenger is to regularly create copies in the cloud storage. All you need is an active Google account and access to Google Drive.
Method 4. Restore chat in WhatsApp without linking to Google
If you do not use Google services for some reason, you can try to make a backup from a local copy. First of all, make sure it's there. To do this, open the Files application (file manager, my files) and find the WhatsApp folder. We are interested in the name Databases. All information about your correspondence is stored there in encrypted form, copies of which are created automatically if you have not disabled this feature. nine0005
How to get back a deleted chat in WhatsApp?
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1. Connect your mobile device to the PC with a cable. Copy folder contents from phone memory and memory card.
- Back up data on the phone via settings-chats-backup chats.
- Copy the fresh backup file that WhatsApp will create to the PC again in a new folder.
- Delete the messenger from the phone.
- Select a copy file made a few days ago (some time before the information you need was deleted). nine0008
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Transfer this file to an application folder called Databases in the phone memory and on the memory card.
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Download WhatsApp and install it. After receiving the SMS, you will see an offer to restore from a local copy.
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The program will automatically find the required file and decrypt the chat from it.
Conclusion
We told you about how to return chats in WhatsApp using several methods. As you can see, none of them involve complex manipulations: everything is quite simple, and most importantly, quickly. It’s great if you don’t forget about backups that will reduce your nerves and time, help you quickly resolve the issue of how to recover deleted chats in WhatsApp.
But if this does not happen, there is always a way out. The Tenorshare UltData WhatsApp Recovery utility can handle this task in a few minutes. It is enough to install it and configure the backup procedure. Then the program will do everything for you. Reliable and affordable, it will recover important information. nine0005
How to recover deleted WhatsApp chats
October 15 Likbez Technologies
Quick ways through backups or third party software.
How to restore chats on Android
From a Google Drive backup
You can fully restore deleted WhatsApp chats from Google Drive only if you first activate the backup function. To do this, in the application settings, you need to go along the path "Chats" → "Backup of chats", and then set the frequency of creating a backup: daily, weekly or monthly. nine0005
The backup will only be stored on the Google account that originally started the backup. To restore correspondence, you need to use the same phone number to which your account in the messenger is registered.
- Install or reinstall WhatsApp. Open the app and verify your phone number.
- Confirm the request to restore chats and media files from the Google Drive backup.
- When the process is complete, click Next. nine0008
- If there were media files in the backup, the application will continue to restore them in the background after the chats are returned.
From a local backup
Your device stores local backup files from the last week. To recover deleted messages, you need to transfer these entries to the folder with the WhatsApp chat database using a file manager.
- Start the file manager on your smartphone.
- The files you need are located in the local storage or on the SD card. To find them, follow the path Android → media → com.whatsapp → WhatsApp. This folder contains three directories: Backups, Databases, and Media. Migrate content from Backups to Databases. nine0008
- Reinstall and open WhatsApp. Verify your phone number.
- The application will offer to restore chats and media files from a local backup if it does not find a backup in Google Drive. Click Restore.
With a specialized application
There are a large number of WhatsApp data recovery tools. For example, Tenorshare UltData, Wondershare MobileTrans, iMyFone D-Back and similar programs. They should pull up deleted chats and other information both from the smartphone’s memory and from backups. nine0005
Almost all apps require a subscription to activate the WhatsApp data recovery feature. At the same time, they do not have extraordinary algorithms for rolling back deleted files. For example, the mobile version of the UltData for Android application uses the same reserves as the messenger itself. Therefore, it is not worth placing high hopes on such programs. But you can use one of these PC utilities if other methods have not worked.
In most cases the sequence is very similar:
- Connect your smartphone to your computer with a cable and open the recovery program.
- On the main screen, select Restore WhatsApp Data or similar.
- Put the device into USB debugging mode. The application will display the appropriate instructions.
- After connecting your smartphone, proceed to the next step by clicking the Next or Start button. Most often, at this point, a window appears with a description of paid features and a call to purchase. Pay for a subscription or one-time cost. nine0008
- Next, the program may offer to make a copy of the data just in case.
- The application will search and after a few minutes will display a list of found chats. Check all the ones you need and click "Restore".
- Select a location to save data on the device.
How to restore chats on iOS
From an iCloud backup
You can use auto-save to iCloud to back up and restore your chat history. As in the case of Android, you must first activate the backup in the WhatsApp settings. nine0005
You can only start a restore with the same Apple ID that you use with iCloud.
