The central theses
- WhatsApp backups are not foolproof and can lead to data loss.
- WhatsApp’s backup system relies on third-party storage and local backups are not supported on modern Android devices.
- Prevent data loss by archiving chats in a human-readable format and backing up media separately.
Here’s a horror story for you: WhatsApp deleted all my chats when I failed to reset my phone. The scary thing is that it can happen to you too. I didn’t do anything wrong, which shows that WhatsApp backups aren’t foolproof. Here’s what you can do to keep your chats safe.
Understanding WhatsApp’s temporary backup system
Let me preface this by saying that I have never liked WhatsApp. WhatsApp was fundamentally poorly designed and developed. It is not seamless on any level. I depend on it because my friends and family use WhatsApp exclusively.
I could go on and on about the problems with WhatsApp, but the worst of all is its makeshift backup system. WhatsApp backups are done through a third party provider – either iCloud or Google Drive. You manage the backup yourself on your personal cloud storage. Chats and media are uploaded to that cloud. If you reinstall the app, change phones, or factory reset the device, you can restore your backup with WhatsApp during setup. If something goes wrong during setup and the restore fails, it will just boot up blank. There are no redundancies and no failover. And once a backup is gone, it’s gone forever.
If you’ve ever used Telegram (a better WhatsApp alternative), you’ll know that you’re never asked to set up backups. And you never see a notification every morning that your chats are backing up. That’s because Telegram handles the backup and syncing in the background. You can log in anywhere – on your phone, desktop, or in the browser – and all your chats and media are always there – no progress bars in sight.
There is no justification for a modern app to create backups on the user side and, what’s more, store them in the user’s personal cloud storage. WhatsApp doesn’t provide any instructions on how to secure these backups or create redundancies. You can create local backups yourself, but WhatsApp won’t let you restore them (more on that shortly). You’ll keep getting redirected to restoring from the cloud.
There are dozens of posts on /r/WhatsApp complaining about lost chats and failed backups. This is a fairly common problem, but Meta has made no effort to fix it.
The incident
And that 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 few times while switching phones. It was never smooth sailing, but it did the trick.
When I recently had to factory reset my phone, everything went wrong. I made a routine backup of my chats and media to Google Drive (I also downloaded the database backup file to my PC for safekeeping). Then I proceeded with the reset. After the reset, I installed WhatsApp, logged in, and tapped “Restore” from my Google Drive backup. The size of this backup was much smaller than usual.
The app said it was loading the chat media in the background and showed me a progress bar at the top. But my private text chains were missing and the rest was empty (only the groups were shown). I panicked and tried to restore my backup by reinstalling WhatsApp. No luck.
It turns out that WhatsApp had overwritten the original backup with a blank backup at some point during the reset. I lost years of valuable texts and media (I hadn’t backed them up anywhere other than WhatsApp backup). It was disappointing to say the least.
I didn’t give up all hope because I had a copy of the backup saved on my hard drive. But WhatsApp refuses to cooperate with its own backup files. Every time I tried to load the downloaded backup file, I was redirected to the cloud backup. For some unknown reason, you have to be using Android 9 or lower to be able to restore local backups. WhatsApp has dropped local backup support for modern Android devices.
So that’s where we are at right now. WhatsApp deleted the backup I had on Google Drive and replaced it with an empty file. The local copy I made for this exact situation doesn’t work because WhatsApp no longer supports its own local backups.
How to prevent WhatsApp data loss
You can back up your media separately to the cloud or to a physical drive. You can archive entire chats individually in a human-readable format and back up that archive.
Open a chat you want to back up, tap the three dots at the top, then tap “More” and select “Export Chat.” WhatsApp will ask you if you want to export the chat “Without Media” or “With Media.” Choose an option and wait for WhatsApp to process the ZIP file. Once it’s finished, you’ll see a share menu at the bottom that lets you copy the ZIP file to your phone storage or share it with other apps.
You can include media in this zip file, but it will not include all the media files in the chat, only the most recent ones. How many files exactly and how recent is anyone’s guess as WhatsApp Help Center doesn’t specify anything. I recommend manually backing up each important media file. It will also not include the entire text history. You can get up to 100,000 of your most recent texts in this chat.
I was unable to restore the local backup. However, it is technically possible to restore from a local database. This allows you to create a local, encrypted backup.
Open your favorite file explorer app and open WhatsApp > Databases. You will see some CRYPT14 files. The most recent file is your last backup, which you can copy to another location or device.
Never trust WhatsApp backups. If you have been waiting to copy some important files or texts from your WhatsApp chats, now is the time to do it. Learn from my misfortune. I hope this never happens to you.
