How to Restore WhatsApp Chat History and Retrieve Messages

Perhaps, at the moment that our mobile phone stops working, regardless of the reason, one of the biggest concerns in not losing everything we have stored in the device itself. The photos or videos may have been uploaded to a cloud service, however, in order to recover WhatsApp messages, we will have to have a backup set up beforehand. Although as we show below, if we have access to our phone’s files, it is also possible to restore a local backup.

Recover your WhatsApp chats from the cloud

If we need to transfer messages from the messaging application to a new phone or retrieve them in ours, we can do so through the backup stored in Google Drive. To do this, we need to use the same phone number and Google account we had before losing the messages or on the mobile we used previously. The steps to follow are:

• Uninstall and reinstall the app if we are going to use the same device, install it if it is a new one.
• We open WhatsApp and verify our phone number .
• We accept the permissions requested by the app.
• Next it will show us information about the last backup found.
• We check the date and size of it and if everything is correct, click on Restore .

• We wait for the restoration to complete and click Next .
• Our chats will be displayed once the initialization is complete. Then, it will begin with the restoration of multimedia files.
• We complete the installation process and we should already have all the WhatsApp chat history on the phone.

If the backup could not be restored, we must check:

• If we have Internet connection in the mobile.
• If we have enough space on the device to retrieve all the information.
• That we are using the same phone number .
• That we are using the same Google account where the backup was saved.

In the event that we have never saved a backup on Google Drive or iCloud, our chats will be automatically recovered from the backup stored on our mobile phone, as long as we are using the same terminal. However, we can also restore WhatsApp chat history ourselves from a local copy .

Recover WhatsApp chats from a local copy

It is important to know that Facebook‘s own messaging app has an automatic backup system that is stored locally on our mobile phones. And is that WhatsApp makes a daily automatic backup of all our messages at 2:00 a.m.

Once the daily process is finished, each backup copy is stored in the internal memory of our phone, keeping only the copies of the last seven days. These copies are stored as a single file in the / sdcard / WhatsApp folder , although we may also find them in the ” internal storage ” or ” main storage ” folders .

To restore WhatsApp chat history from a local copy to another phone, the first thing we have to do is download an app to manage the files on the device where we were previously using the application. Next, we go to the path indicated above and transfer the files with the backup to the new phone. To do this, we can send them directly to any email address to which we have access in the new terminal, transferring them to our PC and from there to the new mobile phone or through a memory card if both phones support it.

What if we want an older backup?

It is also possible to recover WhatsApp chat history from an older backup. For it:

• We download a file manager app .
• We navigate from the app to the sdcard / WhatsApp / Databases path .
  • If our data is stored on the SD memory card, we may find the folder with another name such as “internal storage” or “main storage” instead of sdcard.
• We rename the backup we want to restore from mgstore-YYY-MM-DD-1.db.crypt12 to msgstore.db.crypt12.
• Uninstall and reinstall Whatsapp.
• We select the Restore option when requested.

Older backups may show a crypt9 or crypt10 extension. In that case, even if we rename the file we should not change the extension.