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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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Home How To How to restore deleted WhatsApp chats: A step-by-step guide
Deleted important WhatsApp chats? Here’s how you can retrieve them with ease
WhatsApp has established itself as the most-used go-to web-based media platform for chatting and connecting with loved ones.
While it has eased the process of chatting, sharing media and documents, sometimes we do manage to delete some important WhatsApp chats by mistake and keep regretting afterwards. If you too have deleted some important messages from a WhatsApp chat and are wondering how to get it back, then this is the right place for you. The deleted WhatsApp chats can be recovered by just a few simple and easy tricks. Read on to know about how to retrieve deleted WhatsApp chats.
Recovering deleted WhatsApp messages becomes easier if you have enabled WhatApp back-up before deleting these chats. You will just need to import the backed up WhatsApp data to Whatsapp App and the deleted WhatsApp messages will be recovered.
Apart from this, you can also recover WhatsApp messages from Google Drive. It's a safe tool to backup and access all files, including WhatsApp data, from any device. Here's a step-by-step guide to backup WhatsApp messages with Google Drive.
Step 1: Open your WhatsApp app and select "More options."
Step 2: Go to "Settings" and select "Chats"
Step 3: Choose "Chat back up" and click "Back up to Google Drive".
Step 4: You will be redirected to a new page where you will need to set up the backup frequency for your phone.
Step 5: Set a frequency and choose the Google account where you want to store your backup chat history. In the case where you don't have any Google account connected to your device, select "Add account" and enter your login credentials.
Step 6: Now choose "Backup over" and select the "network" that you want to use for your backups.
Step 7: WhatsApp chat backup will start.
| Time | Tools | Supplies |
| 30 Minutes | Smartphone |
|
Step 1:
Once your WhatsApp messages are backed up on Google Drive, delete WhatsApp and reinstall it on your phone.
Step 2:
Now sign in with the registered WhatsApp number and it will automatically detect the data backed up on Google Drive before and will ask you if you want to restore the same.
Step 3:
Select yes and your deleted messages will be retrieved.
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First Published Date: 11 Mar, 11:13 IST
Tags: whatsapp whatsapp guide
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Accidentally or on purpose, you could delete a conversation or some individual message in WhatsApp.
Fortunately, it can be restored, since by default the application makes backups either to the device itself or to a virtual drive that is linked to your account (for example, Google Drive).
However, if for some reason the automatic backup function is disabled in the settings, then most likely you will not be able to restore deleted messages. nine0005
Contents
There is nothing difficult here, as the messenger saves the history of correspondence in a special file that can be restored directly from the WhatsApp interface. True, no later than 7 days later. Otherwise, the data is overwritten and it is not possible to carry out the recovery procedure. nine0005
WhatsApp creates backup copies of the message history, but you can try to reinstall it so that it offers you to use it.
It is important that the installation is done through official services - Google Play or AppStore. Otherwise, nothing will work. The instruction looks like this:
If certain messages were deleted on your device, this does not mean that they were also deleted from the interlocutor. Write to him and ask them to send you a new one. This method is suitable if you have the opportunity to write to a person or group of people of interest. nine0005
Read also:
WhatsApp web application (WhatsApp)
Instructions on how to delete someone else's message in a WhatsApp group
How to restore photos in Android (Android)
How to delete correspondence in (WhatsApp) WhatsApp
If deleted messages are more than 7 days old from the moment they were deleted, then it will be impossible to restore them using the first method. True, you can still restore them:
You can do this through the interface of the usual "Explorer" for Android. WhatsApp/Databases db.crypt12 . Save your changes. When you clean your smartphone, WhatsApp backups that are located on the primary media or memory card may be affected. To restore them, you will need to use special programs. You will also have to connect your smartphone to a computer on which a program for recovering deleted data is installed. Further instructions will be considered on the example of the program - Hitman Partition Recovery.
Next, you will need to reinstall WhatsApp. More about this was written in the first method of the article.
You can also create backup copies of messages and conversations yourself, and choose where to put them (on a memory card, virtual disk or main storage). The instructions for creating them are as follows:
To do this, click on the inscription "Google Drive Backup" . A deleted WhatsApp conversation can be restored even if a lot of time has passed since it was deleted. These instructions cover only common cases, so they cannot always guarantee a 100% result. nine0005
Previously, this was not possible, but at the end of 2017, the developers of the messenger began testing the "Delete for everyone" function.
You can delete a message from personal and group chats, even if someone has time to read it. The recipient (or recipients in group chats) will see a notification that the message has been deleted, so get ready to explain what was written there and why you first sent it and then deleted it. nine0005
The only limitation of the function is that you can delete a message for everyone within 7 minutes after sending. After this time, only one item will remain: "Delete from me." On Android, deletion works the same way, so it doesn't matter which platform you're communicating from.
The main requirement is that the device must have the latest version of WhatsApp installed, as this is a new feature that comes to the application along with the update.
If you or the recipient are not using the latest version of the application, the feature will not work. If the message wasn't deleted for everyone, you won't receive a notification that the operation was successful.
We figured out how to delete a sent message in WhatsApp on iPhone, but there are still a few questions related to dialogues in the messenger. For example, how to completely clear the chat from messages. You need to understand that it will become clean only with you; the interlocutor will keep the correspondence in full, if he does not delete it himself.
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Individual and group chats are cleared according to the same scheme:
You can clear all available chats at the same time using a special function in the messenger settings.
All messages from all chats will be deleted, but only on your phone. You can ask your interlocutors to follow a similar procedure, but until then, all correspondence will be stored on their devices.
Even conversations cleared of messages will be displayed in the messenger on the "Chats" screen. To remove them from there, you need to perform one more operation - deleting the chat. For an individual chat, the following instruction will work:
You can use a different procedure: open the "Chats" screen, click "Edit" in the upper left corner, select a chat and tap "Delete".
To get rid of a group chat, you must first leave it. For this:
