How to recover deleted WhatsApp messages

We’ve all done it: tapped the wrong thing and sent a crucial messag e to the fiery pits of doom, aka the trash. If you’ve done it in WhatsApp we have bad news and good news. The bad news is that WhatsApp doesn’t store your chats online. Boo! The good news is that your phone makes automatic backups. Yay! Here’s 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
• 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.crypt8 to msgstore.db.crypt8
• Reinstall WhatsApp
• Choose Restore when prompted

WhatsApp backs up your messages and settings for seven days.

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.

How to recover deleted WhatsApp messages on iPhone and iPad

Is there a difference between recovering WhatsApp messages on Android and on an iPhone or iPad? They're both relatively straightforward, actually. If you're an Android user who also has an Apple device, then you might want to know how recovering deleted WhatsApp messages works for iOS.
Once you've enabled iCloud Backup in the WhatsApp settings, you can restore your chats by going into WhatsApp Settings > Chats and Calls > Chat Backup. Provided a backup is visible, delete and reinstall the app and you’ll then be prompted to restore your chat history. It's the same, in principle, to how it works on Android.

On iPhones, WhatsApp uses iCloud to backup – but you'll need to configure it. / © WhatsApp

Have you accidentally deleted chats you couldn’t get back? Tell us your tales of woe in the comments below!