The scary part is it can happen to you, too.
I didn’t do anything wrong, which goes to show that WhatsApp’s backups aren’t foolproof.
Here’s what you’ve got the option to do to protect your chats.
Lucas Gouveia / Corbin Davenport / How-To Geek
Understanding WhatsApps Makeshift Backup System
Let me preface this by saying that Ive never liked WhatsApp.
WhatsApp was poorly conceived and designed from the ground up.
Its not seamless at any level.
Jason Montoya / How-To Geek
Im locked into it because my friends and family exclusively use WhatsApp.
You manage the backup yourself on your personal cloud storage.
Chats and media upload to that cloud.
If something goes wrong during that setup and the restore fails, itll just start blank.
There are no redundancies and no failsafe.
And once a backup is gone, its gone forever.
And you never see a notification every morning that your chats are being backed up.
Thats because Telegram quietly handles backup and sync in the background.
WhatsApp comes with no instructions on how to secure those backups or how to create redundancies.
Itll keep redirecting you to restore from the cloud.
There are dozens of posts on/r/WhatsAppcomplaining about lost chats and backup fails.
Its a pretty common issue, but Meta has made zero efforts to address it.
The Incident
Which brings us to the incident.
My WhatsApp is set to create daily backups of my media and chat history.
Those daily backups turned into almost five years of chats and media stored on my Google Drive.
I’ve successfully restored that backup a couple of times when switching phones.
It was never seamless, but it got the job done.
Everything went wrong when I recently had to factory reset my phone.
Then, I proceeded with the reset.
After the reset, I installed WhatsApp, logged in, and tapped Restore on my Google Drive backup.
The size of this backup was much smaller than usual.
I panicked and tried to restore my backup by reinstalling WhatsApp.
Turns out, WhatsApp overwrote the original backup with a blank at some point during the reset.
It was disappointing, to say the least.
I didnt lose all hope because I had a copy of the backup saved on my disk.
But WhatsApp refuses to play nice with its own backup files.
It kept redirecting me to the cloud backup every time I tried to load the downloaded backup file.
For some unknown reason, you gotta beon Android 9 or belowto be able to restore local backups.
WhatsApp axed local backup support for modern Android devices.
So thats where we currently stand.
WhatsApp nuked the backup I had on Google Drive and replaced it with a blank file.
For entire chats, you could archive them individually into a human-readable format and back up that archive.
WhatsApp will ask you if you want to export the chat Without Media or Include Media.
Pick one and wait for WhatsApp to process the zip file.
How many files exactly and how recent is anyones guess, because the WhatsApp Help Center doesnt specify anything.
I recommend manually backing up every important media file.
It will not include the entire text history either.
it’s possible for you to get up to 100,000 of your most recent texts in that chat.
I couldnt manage to restore the local backup.
But it is technically possible to restore from a local database.
So heres how you might create a local, encrypted backup.
Open your preferredFile Explorer appand open WhatsApp > Databases.
Youll see a few CRYPT14 files.
Never trust WhatsApp backups.
If youve been waiting to copy some important files or texts from your WhatsApp chats, nows the time.
Learn from my misfortune.
I hope it never happens to you.
