Are you desperate because you accidentally deleted WhatsApp messages or even an entire chat with vital messages for you? Have you been trying for hours with absurd plans to find them, but can't get a spider out of the hole? Don't despair. If you need to recover deleted messages from WhatsApp we have good news for you: WhatsApp periodically saves our conversations. If you have an Android phone, the good news goes to two: WhatsApp, in fact, makes a double save, one with Google drive and another directly on the device. So the chances of recovering deleted messages are doubled.
Before going through the simpler methods for restoring deleted messages on WhatsApp we must unfortunately warn you of the possibility that you cannot restore lost messages, but before giving up, let's try to see all the options! If luck will assist us, we will be able to recover deleted messages from WhatsApp. Let's start with the simplest and most valid method for many devices.
Read also | How to use Whatsapp Web
- How to recover chats on WhatsApp with Google Drive
- How to recover deleted messages on WhatsApp from an Android phone
- How to recover deleted messages from WhatsApp on iPhone and Windows Phone
How to recover chats on WhatsApp with Google Drive
Google Drive provides WhatsApp users with a storage space for backing up chats. Furthermore, starting from August 2018, as stated in a note sent by email to Google users, "following new agreements between WhatsApp and Google - for all users, starting from 12 November 2018 - WhatsApp backups will no longer affect your Google Drive storage quota. However, any WhatsApp backups that have not been updated for more than a year will be automatically removed from the storage space ",
To recover deleted WhatsApp messages, you must first understand when the last save with Google Drive took place. If you are wondering how to understand when the backup on Google Drive has been performed, all you have to do is open your WhatsApp application, click on the icon with the three vertical dots at the top right, go to Settings> Chat> Backup of the chat. The date of the last save on Google drive will appear.
Now the main point: Did you delete the WhatsApp chat before or after the last save? In fact, to be sure to recover the messages you are looking for, you must have deleted them after the backup. The reason is simple: if you deleted them and then the backup happened, the backup saved the chats when your messages were already gone!
Let's take another example: yesterday you accidentally deleted an entire chat, but the automatic backup happened the day before yesterday. Good! You're barely there, because the chat was still there the day before yesterday. If this is your case, then it won't be difficult for you to recover your deleted WhatsApp messages. To do this, just uninstall the App and reinstall it. When you install WhatsApp again, the application will ask you if you want to restore the old conversations and that's it. Attention, however, all the conversations will be updated to the last save, the following ones will disappear. But what if I deleted the messages before the Google drive backup? Let's see the other options available.
How to recover deleted messages on WhatsApp from an Android phone
If the data saving on Google drive happened after you deleted the messages and you have an Android phone, then there is another way to recover the deleted messages from WhatsApp: through the backup on the device!
To get started you need to install a file manager (you can find tons of them for free). Open the program, browse the folders and go to the WhatsApp “databases” folder. Here you will find only one file named msgstore.db, this is the last backup made on the device. If your messages were deleted after this save, you don't have to change anything. If they have been deleted before, then you have to search among the previous backs in the folder, which will have the file name msgstore-DATADELBACKUP.db.
Now let's say the messages you want to recover were deleted 3 days ago, you need to delete the msgstore.db file and rename the msgstore- (DATADIQUATTROGIORNIFA) .db file with the name msgstore.db, so that the system believes this is the save more recent, even if in fact it is not. Once this is done, to recover deleted messages you need to connect to Google drive and remove WhatsApp from the list of applications that have access to Google drive. At this point you can continue by uninstalling and reinstalling WhatsApp. The program will not download the backup from Google drive but from the device, and more exactly from the file you have chosen. So if you accidentally deleted your WhatsApp messages, don't despair, if everything goes well, the accidentally deleted messages will be there again!
How to recover deleted messages from WhatsApp on iPhone and Windows Phone
The iPhone and Windows phones make only one backup of our conversations: the iPhone only on iCloud, while Windows phone only on the device itself.
If you want to recover deleted WhatsApp messages on iPhone you have to hope that the last iCloud save happened before you deleted the chats. If this is the case, then to restore deleted messages all you have to do is uninstall WhatsApp and install it again. If the backup occurred after the chat disappeared then there is little to do. An extreme attempt to recover deleted messages would be to restore the iPhone through iTunes. It's a pretty risky choice, because you're bringing your iPhone, not just WhatsApp, back to the date you last backed up your phone. All subsequent data will be lost. So if you have no other choice, think about it: the risk is to recover data but lose much more.
To recover deleted WhatsApp chats on Windows phone, the same procedure applies as for Android phone, but you will not have to disable Google drive, because this type of phone does not make any backups on Google drive. Obviously, if the chats have been deleted after the last data save, the road is all downhill: uninstall and reinstall WhatsApp and everything returns as before.
Well, our guide to recover deleted messages from WhatsApp is coming to an end. As you have seen there are several ways to do this, but surely the best way not to lose important chats is to not delete them. But this, I think you have already learned by yourself.