How to recover deleted WhatsApp messages
WhatsApp can't recover voice calls, but it can recover your WhatsApp messages.
How to recover deleted WhatsApp messages: the good news
WhatsApp doesn’t store your chat history on its servers because it wants to keep your chats private, but that doesn’t mean you can’t recover a message or messages you’ve accidentally deleted. With very few exceptions – such as the Nokia S40, a fairly old phone with Nokia’s own OS – the WhatsApp app on your phone makes regular backups, and restoring from those backups couldn’t be simpler.
This is the good news about recovering WhatsApp messages.
How to recover deleted WhatsApp messages on Android
On Android, WhatsApp automatically backs up your message history every night – at 3AM – and stores that backup in the WhatsApp folder of your Android phone. Depending on your device and its settings, that folder could be in the phone’s internal storage or it could be on the external SD card. It might even be backed up to Google Drive.
There are two ways to restore messages. The first will restore your most recent backup, and the second is for recovering older messages.
To restore your most recent backup:
Uninstall WhatsApp
Reinstall WhatsApp
Click Restore when prompted to restore your chat history
Wait a few seconds
Wait a few seconds
That’s it
We told you it was easy. However, there are a few important provisos here. One, your phone number can’t be different from when you backed up your chat. Two, your backup can’t be ancient. And three, if you’ve deleted the backups, then you’re stuffed.
Restoring your most recent WhatsApp backup is really quick and simple. / © WhatsApp
How to recover deleted WhatsApp messages on Android: restoring older backups
By older we mean days, not months: WhatsApp only makes backups of the last seven days. Anything older is lost in the mists of time, and anything sent or received since the backup was made won’t be included either: restoring from the backup is a full restore and overwrites whatever is currently in the app.
To continue, you’ll need a file manager app that you can use to find and rename files.
First of all, create a manual backup to preserve your recent chats. You can do that in the app’s menu button, go to Settings> Chats and Calls> Back up Chats(or Chat Backup, depending on which version you have).
This backup will be saved as msgstore.db.crypt8 in your /sdcard/WhatsApp/Databases folder. Save this file as msgstore.db.crypt8.current so you don’t confuse it with other files.
To restore:
Uninstall WhatsApp
Choose the backup file you want to restore in /sdcard/WhatsApp/Databases
Rename it from msgstore-YYYY-MM-DD.1.db.
Reinstall WhatsApp
Choose Restore when prompted
WhatsApp backs up your messages and settings for seven days. / © ANDROIDPIT
How to recover deleted WhatsApp messages on Android: using Google Drive
If you’ve backed up your chats to Google Drive (which you can do in Settings> Chats and Calls > Chat Backup) then you can restore from that. Make sure you use the same Google Account to backup and restore the chats or the restore process won’t work.
The process is much the same as it is for local backups:
Uninstall WhatsApp
Reinstall WhatsApp
Choose to restore your messages from Google Drive
Wait a bit
That’s it
You can use the Settings>Chats and Calls > Chat Backup area of the WhatsApp app to specify how often it should back up to Google Drive, which account(s) should be backed up and which network to use. Remember that you can’t access backups made with one Google Account from a different Google Account.
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