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Important WhatsApp chat deleted? Recover lost messages with this step-by-step guide

WhatsApp users should know that their lost chats can more often than not be retrieved by following a step-by-step process.

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WhatsApp is the most popular messaging platform in India and many parts of the world. Lakhs of Indians use the Meta-owned texting app every day for variety of tasks and exchange thousands of messages. Sometimes, important messages may be lost, which could happen because of different reasons. A WhatsApp user may end up deleting a chat by mistake or lose it while replacing their old phone with a new one.

Losing important messages could be problematic. Apart from important links, documents photos, contact etc., some chats can just be too valuable to lose. However, WhatsApp users should know that such chats can more often than not be retrieved by following a process where they can access their data stored on cloud or locally on their device.

With end-to-end encryption, users’ chats are not saved by WhatsApp on its servers. They are saved as backup filed on cloud, Google Drive in most cases, or on the internal storage of a user’s smartphone or another device. These databases can be used to back up chats that have been lost. Below, you will find step-by-step guides to recover chats from both local backups or Google Drive backups.

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How to recover WhatsApp chats that are locally backed up?

  • In order to restore a local backup of your WhatsApp chat history, do the following:
  • Go to the file manager app in your phone. If you can’t find one, download from app store.
  • Search among the file folders in internal storage for ‘WhatsApp’.
  • In the ‘WhatsApp’ folder, go to ‘Databases’ where your chat backups are arranged as per dates.
  • Search for the backup of the date from which you want to recover WhatsApp chat history. If the backup is on an external memory chip, copy the folder into the internal storage of your smartphone.
  • Search for a file names msgstore.db.crypt12. Change the name of the file to msgstore_BACKUP.db.crypt12.
  • Next, search for the file named msgstore-YYY-MM-DD.1.db.crypt12. Change this file name to msg.db.crypt12.
  • Uninstall WhatsApp from your device and install it again. Sign in via your phone number and click on ‘Restore’ to recover chat history.
  • You will be able to view deleted chats from the specific database.

How to restore WhatsApp chat from backup in Google Drive?

In order to make a recovery from Google Drive, Android users will have to ensure that their chat backup on the cloud service was enabled. Chats can be backed up this way daily, weekly or monthly as per user preference. This can be used when users switch to a new device which they intend to use with the same Google account. Follow these steps:

  • Delete WhatsApp and reinstall a fresh copy from the Google Play Store.
  • Login to WhatsApp using your phone number.
  • During installation, press on the ‘Restore’ button and complete the recovery process to get back all your chat history.

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