Do you need to recover deleted or missing WhatsApp messages? It's certainly possible, depending on the situation.
Below, you'll learn how to recover deleted WhatsApp messages on your iPhone or Android device. We'll then teach you how to set up an advanced WhatsApp backup plan to ensure you never lose any of your WhatsApp messages again.
In order to retrieve deleted WhatsApp messages, you must have enabled Chat Backup in the app's settings. To reach this, tap the Settings tab. It's on the bottom bar of the iPhone app; on Android, open the three-dot menu at the top-right and choose Settings.
From there, head to Chats > Chat backup. Here (under Auto Backup on iOS and Back up to Google Drive on Android), the app offers several backup frequencies (along with the option to encrypt your WhatsApp backups):
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On Android, WhatsApp makes a local backup every night, but this won't help you if you lose your phone. This is why cloud backups are vital.
WhatsApp deletes older backup files as you create new ones. The iPhone app only keeps the latest backup file, while the Android version keeps "up to the last seven days' worth" of backup files. Keep that in mind as you choose the right backup frequency for your needs.
By having daily auto-backups, you'll be able to easily recover WhatsApp messages soon after deleting them. On the other hand, weekly auto-backups will allow you to go further back in time to recover deleted WhatsApp messages, at the expense of losing recent chat messages.
For a more advanced backup plan for Android devices, scroll down to the "An Advanced WhatsApp Backup Strategy for Android" section below.
Before we look at recovering deleted WhatsApp messages, there's a chance that you might have just archived a missing chat, not deleted it. But what's the difference?
Archiving removes the chat from your list, allowing you to hide conversations that you're done with for now.
You can unarchive a chat at any time to access it again, and archiving doesn't delete anything in the chat. Conversely, deleting a chat erases its contents, so they're no longer accessible to you.
On iPhone, when you archive a chat, you can immediately reverse the archival by shaking your device and choosing Undo to recover the archived chat. But even if you miss this, it's easy to retrieve archived WhatsApp chats later.
To unarchive a WhatsApp chat on iPhone:
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To unarchive a chat on Android:
Wondering how to get back deleted WhatsApp messages after backing them up? You can restore your WhatsApp backup by simply uninstalling and reinstalling WhatsApp on your device.
When you reinstall the app, you will be prompted to restore your message history from the backup file. Tap Restore and you'll retrieve everything from the latest backup. Make sure to do it when prompted, as you can't restore the backup file later.
This method of recovering deleted WhatsApp messages works on both Android and iPhone, as long as you have a backup. Keep in mind that you can only recover backed-up messages within your selected auto-backup frequency, however.
For instance, if you've set the app to back up daily, you can recover any deleted chats before the next daily backup occurs.
But if the app has made a new backup since you deleted certain messages, they're lost for good.
Hopefully, restoring your backup file allowed you to retrieve any deleted media from your chats. If that didn't work, however, read our guide to recovering deleted photos from WhatsApp.
On Android, you can simply open a file explorer app and navigate to /WhatsApp/Media. From there, simply sift through the folders until you find the deleted photos you want to recover.
On iPhone, you should have a backup copy of images saved to your device if you have the Save to Camera Roll option enabled at Settings > Chats in WhatsApp.
Check the above guide for additional methods of media recovery.
Getting deleted messages back after a new WhatsApp backup has run is slightly more difficult. Your success will depend on your selected auto-backup frequency.
Note that the below strategy only works on Android devices, since the OS lets you access local backup files. If you're using an iPhone, your only other method is to restore an iPhone backup that you made before deleting the WhatsApp chats. There are third-party apps that claim to help you recover WhatsApp chats, but they aren't cheap and offer no guarantees. Whether you use these is up to how much you value the missing messages.
Before we dive into the process, here's an overview of restoring older WhatsApp chats on Android:
As mentioned before, WhatsApp on Android retains several days of chat backup files. One is, of course, the latest chat backup. The others, depending on your auto-backup frequency, could be one day or many days old. In addition to the Google Drive cloud backup, WhatsApp stores these backups on your device's local storage.
Open your device's file explorer app (Files by Google is a good option if you don't have one installed), and navigate to /WhatsApp/Databases. Depending on your device, the WhatsApp folder may appear under /sdcard/, /storage/, Internal Memory, or similar.
Within that WhatsApp folder, you'll find the various chat backup files. The latest one is named msgstore.db.crypt12, while the others look like msgstore-YYYY-MM-DD.
1.db.crypt12. As you'd expect, YYYY-MM-DD represents the year, month, and date (respectively) that the backup file was created.
To retrieve WhatsApp messages deleted sometime between two backups, simply do the following:
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After this, uninstall WhatsApp. If you've enabled Google Drive cloud backups, open the Google Drive app, slide out the left menu, and select Backups. You'll see a WhatsApp backup file with your phone number in it. Tap the three-dot Menu to the right of this and choose Delete backup to erase it.
Doing this prevents WhatsApp from using the backup file in Google Drive instead of the local file you want to restore.
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Now, reinstall WhatsApp from the Play Store. During the setup process, you'll be prompted to restore from the backup file you've just tweaked—it will show as X days old instead of the most recent backup file. Confirm restoration from this file.
That's all you have to do in order to retrieve deleted WhatsApp messages from older backups. Once you've restored those messages, feel free to start using WhatsApp as normal again.
When you walk through the above, you'll lose any messages created since the backup you restored. If you only performed that process to restore a few deleted messages, and don't want to lose recent messages, you can export the retrieved chat messages and then restore WhatsApp to the latest backup.
You'll have to run through the entire process again, but it's not difficult.
To export messages, open the chat containing the messages you want to save. Tap the three-dot Menu button at the top-right, followed by More > Export chat. If the chat has media, you'll see an option to export Without media or to Include media.
Including media will add all recent images as attachments, which obviously increases the size of the export file. You can export up to 10,000 messages with media, or 40,000 messages without media.
After you make your choice, choose an app on your phone to share the text file (and attachments, if applicable) containing your messages. You can email this to yourself, add it to cloud storage, or similar. Repeat this for any other chats with messages you want to save.
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Once you're done exporting, follow the steps in the above section again to access your WhatsApp backups.
When you come to renaming the backup files, reverse the process:
Uninstall WhatsApp, delete your Google Drive backup again if needed, and reinstall the app. After you restore from backup, your latest chats will reappear. The messages you exported won't appear inside WhatsApp, but you can at least see them in the text file whenever you need them.
Because you can easily view and edit WhatsApp chat backup files on Android, it's easy to manipulate them. Renaming them allows you to keep as many backup files as you want.
All you need to do is rename a backup in the msgstore-YYYY-MM-DD.1.db.crypt12 format to something else, such as oct11.db.crypt12 or 2021-June-Backup. Because this file doesn't use WhatsApp's naming convention, it's now protected from WhatsApp overwriting it.
Consider creating your own backup file in this way once every month or so. That way, you won't lose tons of messages if you have to restore from an older backup. For even more safety, you should copy these backup files to cloud storage or your computer so that they're safe in case your phone stops working or you lose it.
As you can see, it's fairly easy to recover deleted WhatsApp messages. However, this is only the case if you've backed up your messages ahead of time. This is why the advanced backup strategy is worth setting up if you're an Android user. iPhone owners don't have as many options.
Now that you know you won't lose any WhatsApp messages in the future, it's a good idea to discover some of WhatsApp's other cool features that aren't immediately visible.
If you just switched your phone, you will possibly think about restoring WhatsApp messages from your backup online. The question you will be asking yourself, in this case, would be how can I restore the old WhatsApp chat that I have skipped to restore?
WhatsApp is a commonly used social messaging app in recent days. The existence of billions of users demonstrates the significant role WhatsApp plays when it comes to exchanging messages and various attachments like videos, pictures, and videos. If you have important messages on your WhatsApp, you will not want to lose them when switching your phone. This article will provide easy-to-understand guidelines on how to restore WhatsApp chats on your android and iPhone.
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Besides Google Drive, WhatsApp for android usually backs up messages to the local storage on your phone.
If you uninstall your WhatsApp, there still are chances of restoring the messages and photos. While restoring from Google drive can be the easiest way, you first need to backup the chats before uninstalling the app from your phone. In case you didn’t backup WhatsApp to Google Drive, the local backup file could be used to retrieve the chats when reinstalling the app. The WhatsApp local backup is usually encrypted, unlike the ones in Google Drive.
If your WhatsApp is working and you would like to prepare the most recent WhatsApp backup chats, the following guideline will help you with the process. However, it would help if you remembered that the recent backup files would overwrite the existing ones.
If you need to back up the videos, remember to check the ‘include videos, box and ensure the device has enough storage to accommodate the data.
You can also prevent WhatsApp from backing up your chats to Google Drive. In this case, you should choose your backup frequency to “never.” You will then proceed to tap on the Backup button to begin the process of backing up your WhatsApp data to the local internal storage. You will have the latest WhatsApp chats backup on your phone.
To restore the WhatsApp chats backup using the local backup, you need to uninstall or delete the WhatsApp application from your phone and then reinstall.
Tap on the restore option to get all your recent WhatsApp chats.If you had not backed up the recent WhatsApp chats on your phone before deleting the application, you could still restore from a previous local backup. The following process with get you done.
If you use WhatsApp to exchange confidential messages and files, you will not want to lose them. Since unexpected events might occur that might lead to WhatsApp data loss, it is advisable to back up everything to a computer. There are many ways to achieve this task regardless of whether you use android or iOS devices.
The possible methods you can use to backup WhatsApp chats to a computer include:
Email chat feature.
Transferring directly from the phone memory.
Using a tool called MobileTrans.
MobileTrans is seemingly the easiest way to backup WhatsApp content, including messages, images, videos, and other attachments to a computer with one click.
Below is a brief highlight of the software.
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MobileTrans comes with a couple of features to perform different WhatsApp tasks for both android and iOS devices. Besides transferring WhatsApp data from your phone to the computer, MobileTrans can perform WhatsApp transfer from one phone to another, transfer other content on other social media apps, and restore everything with some clicks.
MobileTrans allows WhatsApp users to transfer content selectively. The software is compatible with various types of data, including messages, audio, videos, messages, and more. You can perfectly transfer to any version of android and iOS device. Transferring to a computer or another device only requires one click hence saving your time. Besides, you do not have to worry about your privacy because MobileTrans will always keep your chat history safe.
The tool can also restore the WhatsApp backup to your phone conveniently. In the process of restoring WhatsApp data, MobileTrans does not overwrite the existing data on your phone.
The following steps will guide you on transferring your WhatsApp from your android device to the computer using MobileTrans – WhatsApp transfer. The method is safe, easy, and does not require an internet connection to achieve the task.
Soon after WhatsApp data is backed up successfully, you will receive success notification on the screen.The following section provides a precise comparison of MobileTrans – WhatsApp transfer with other methods to back up WhatsApp data to a computer, i.e., exporting directly from phone memory and the email chat feature. The comparison is based on various elements as described below.
Process time for the transfer: MobileTrans – WhatsApp transfer is the fastest and precise method to transfer WhatsApp data.
Exporting from phone memory is slower than the MobileTrans tool but faster than the email chat feature. Email chat is a complicated process and not preferable for most WhatsApp users.
Reliability: MobileTrans and email chat are reliable methods because the WhatsApp messages are readable after transferring to a computer. When you export directly from phone memory, the chats are not readable because the file format is incompatible. You need a WhatsApp backup extractor to convert the files into a readable format.
Transfer rate: MobileTrans tool sends bulk content with a single click, seemingly time-saving and efficient. Exporting directly from the phone memory is relatively fast than the email chat feature, which sends only a single chat at a time.
Data loss: MobileTrans tool does not involve any data loss issues whatsoever or compromise the chat history. The email chat feature also has rare cases of data loss. On the other hand, exporting WhatsApp data directly from phone memory can sometimes have data loss events.
Prior knowledge: When using the MobileTrans - WhatsApp transfer tool, you are provided with an easy follow the wizard to guide you through the transfer process. You don’t need to have prior knowledge because the instructions are unique and clear. Email chat feature requires you to be familiar with the WhatsApp environment and its controls. When exporting WhatsApp data directly from the phone memory, you need to know the location of the content and controls in your computer.
Conclusion
Following the discussions in the above content, you can easily restore your old WhatsApp chats in case you skipped to restore. The methods are described in detail to help you achieve the task with convenience. You only need to pay attention to the approach to ensure you get all your desired messages from the local storage. And if you are looking to backup your WhatsApp content to a computer, MobileTrans WhatsApp transfer is an incredible tool to help you achieve the task conveniently.
The steps involved during the backup process are precise and straightforward. Furthermore, you don’t have to worry about the safety of your data.
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Messengers have been in our life for a very long time, but it was during the pandemic that they became more popular than ever. At a time when social activity was limited to online communication, people of all ages switched to Viber, Telegram and WhatsApp. Often there are cases when, due to the large number of chats, some messages are accidentally deleted. And this can be an important work chat or personal correspondence that you really want to keep. Today we will try to tell you about how to restore correspondence in WhatsApp if there is no backup .
We will consider the example of Android users.
When might you need help with data recovery?
Such cases seem hopeless at first glance, but they are not: it is possible to restore correspondence in WhatsApp.
Such a case is considered almost hopeless: it is unlikely that deleted messages will be restored.
But there is always an exception to every rule.
The only thing you can do is to ask the second participant in the correspondence to send it to you. Yes, the whole chat can be sent to your phone. This is done within the application itself without additional tools. How to forward messages?
2. Then a “right arrow” will appear in the upper right corner, which opens the contact list. From it your interlocutor will choose your number.
This method will help you return the correspondence in WhatsApp, if the deletion was through the "Delete at home" function. If both sides had deleted, then there is no chance to restore the messages. You can forward the entire chat. For this you need:
Select a chat, and specify the method of sending.
How to restore correspondence in WhatsApp if there was no backup copy, and the interlocutor also cannot send you messages? In fact, there is a proven method that does not involve backup, but involves the use of a third-party utility. It's about Tenorshare UltData WhatsApp Recovery.
This is a modern and reliable program that helps you quickly and efficiently recover messages in the WhatsApp messenger. Its main advantage is ease of use. The developers took care of all device owners. UltData WhatsApp Recovery is compatible with thousands of Android/iOS devices: tablets, phones from Samsung, Xiaomi, Huawei, Oppo, Motorola, etc. We have developed detailed instructions.
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.
Connect your device with a cable to a PC.
The program will request a special setting to synchronize with the device. It will take some time.
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.
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.
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.
The operation was successfully completed if this icon appears on the screen.
We told you how to restore correspondence in WhatsApp if there was no backup.
But in order to avoid such situations, we recommend making regular copies within the program itself.
This is very simple and takes just a couple of minutes, but in the future it will save you from several hours of trying to recover lost data.
Click on the "Backup of chats" button. After that, whatsapp will ask you how often you would like to do them. Choose the period of time through which it will be more convenient for you. Ideally, this should be done daily. Especially if you have a lot of work correspondence.
When creating backups, WhatsApp will prompt you to select the connection method in which it will backup: Wi-Fi or cellular. If you do not have constant access to wireless Internet, then we recommend that you choose the second method.
There is another reliable way to create backups so that you do not have to look for the answer to the question: "How to return correspondence in WhatsApp.
" It's about creating a backup copy with saving on Google Drive.
Don't worry about whatsapp copies will use up all your Google Drive storage: they don't touch it at all. What else do you need to know about this feature?
We tried to tell you in detail about how to restore WhatsApp correspondence if there was an accidental deletion or the phone was lost. As you could understand, you can do this without a backup copy only if your interlocutor prudently saved your dialogue and is ready to share it. If the messages are deleted on both devices, we recommend using the Tenorshare UltData WhatsApp Recovery program.
It can be used on both smartphones and tablets. It supports thousands of different models and multiple operating system versions. With its help, you will learn how to restore WhatsApp correspondence without a backup in just a couple of clicks. Simple and reliable, it will save your data and return valuable messages.
WhatsApp is one of the largest instant messengers. Through it, people around the world communicate both at work and on personal matters. But whatever the subject of conversation, the loss of correspondence is unpleasant. However, this still happens, so it is useful to know what are the ways to recover deleted messages in WhatsApp. Here's how to do it on iPhone.
WhatsApp conversation history is not stored on the servers of the service itself, but you can use the backup copy that the application places in the iCloud cloud to backup and restore the chat history.
But you need to understand that in this case it will not be possible to preview the correspondence and select the necessary elements.
Step 1: Enable automatic backup
First of all, you need to make sure that automatic backup is enabled. You can check that this is the case by going to WhatsApp > Settings > Chats > Chat Backup.
Step 2: Restore Chat History
Now uninstall WhatsApp on your iPhone and reinstall it from the App Store, then verify your phone number. After a successful login, a welcome notification will appear asking you to restore your chat history. Just select the "Restore Chat History" option and the recovery process will begin. When it completes, the number of recovered messages will be displayed.
Tenorshare UltData is a powerful data recovery tool not only for WhatsApp but also for many other types of data.
Whether it was lost due to accidental deletion or malware attack, Tenorshare UltData can perfectly recover lost data. In addition, you can recover deleted data both directly from iPhone and from iCloud and iTunes backups.
This tool is compatible with Mac and Windows operating systems and supports more than 20 types of data, including WhatsApp deleted data.
How to Recover Deleted WhatsApp Messages on iPhone with Tenorshare UltData:
Step 1. Launch the program
If you don't have UltData, please download and install it on your computer. Then connect your iPhone with a USB cable. Click "Recover from iOS Device" and let the program detect your iPhone. After a successful discovery, all types of data on your iPhone will be displayed on the screen.
Step 2: Scan
In the list of data types displayed on the screen, select "WhatsApp and attachments". At the bottom of the screen, click the "Start Scan" button.
Step 3: Restore
After the scanning process is completed successfully, the interface will display a list of deleted items. Tick the WhatsApp related options in the left panel (messages and/or attachments) and then view those deleted messages. Select what you want to restore and click the desired Restore button at the bottom of the screen.
This method is suitable for those who regularly back up their iPhone to iTunes. The process of restoring WhatsApp messages from iTunes backups is quite simple, but only the last three backups are available for restoration.
Step 1. Open iTunes and connect your iPhone.
Step 2. Click on the iPhone icon and select the "Restore from Backup" option.
Step 3. Select the backup file containing the desired WhatsApp messages and click "Restore"
Restore deleted WhatsApp chat from iCloud backup for the entire iPhone Unlike the very first method, here we will talk about restore all iPhone data from iCloud copy. But at the same time, you will need to reset the smartphone and restore all data from the cloud.
The first step is to make sure that these backups are created. To do this, just go to Settings > iCloud > Backup. If iCloud backup is activated, you can recover deleted WhatsApp messages as follows.
Step 1. Go to Settings > General > Reset > Erase All Content and Settings.
Step 2. Follow the on-screen instructions until the Apps & Data option appears. Select the "Restore from iCloud Backup" option.
Step 3. Select the appropriate iCloud backup and wait for the restore process to complete successfully. It is important to note that an internet connection is critical throughout the entire process. Therefore, make sure that the Wi-Fi network is not disabled during the process.
