WhatsApp Nuked 5 Years of My Texts and Media—Don't Let it Happen to You

Although I don't need that long backup, but the way WA backup are designed, its indeed very poor.
Yesterday was trying to restore my backup, through cloud and then through new transfer backup mode and both failed.
Then again I tried using cloud backup and it worked but transfer chat method never worked for me and its always hit or miss.
Its a nightmare restoring WA backups !
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: Simar
It's indeed very unreliable, just last week it was giving me some error because it just couldn't complete the backup to Google drive. Already forgotten how I solved it, but I had to spend 3-4 hours on it. Setting up a new Android phone is the only time I'm tempted to give in to the Apple ecosystem.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Simar
The comments in the HTG article explain how to make and restore a local WhatsApp backup better, more completely and accurately than the article itself...People expecting to backup and restore multiple gigabytes of (mostly useless) WhatsApp media to and from cloud are in for a surprise
 
Last edited:
I keep local deduplicated backups of the whatsapp directory using restic, a weekly cron job to create backups via termux
There was a incident in past where whatsapp was not allowing to restore from the local backups but it was shortly fixed and this approach of mine is working quite nicely from last 2 years
 
There is also android to ios whatsapp data move thing. It can only by transferred to iPhone when we factory reset it. Wasted few hours on this last night.
 
For manual local WhatsApp data backup, after reset I just place all the files in Android>data>com.whatsapp.something>Media etc (maintaining the exact folder tree as they were before reset), after placing the files here I install WhatsApp and it immediately says local backup found.
But the overall backup - restore thing in WhatsApp is really poor.
 
Yeah i stopped trusting the Android backup/restore nonsense long ago when they didn't bother to show up my Android backup after changing phone. Lost messages call logs all. I take WhatsApp backup on daily basis now, it's annoying af to see that backup notification around 2 am, or basically on its whim really. It just fancies to take the backup whenever! Wish there was an option to set the time for backup
 
Top Bottom