How to Recover Deleted WhatsApp Messages from Your Android, Iphone & Other Phones?

We all have atleast for once accidentally deleted a WhatsApp chat and then regretted. Now u need not worry as here, we will inform a way to restore deleted WhatsApp chats and one method to bring back WhatsApp chats overwritten by an iCloud or Google Drive backup.

But before that, you must know that chats can be restored if the backup option had been turned on in the first place on WhatsApp. It means that if you had never done a backup of your chats, then it is not possible to recover any messages or chats that you have accidentally deleted.

Next, these methods are tested by many and have worked but they involve uninstalling WhatsApp and restoring from the most recent backup. It could mean that you lose some messages that have arrived between the time of your last backup and when you accidentally deleted a chat.

Therefore, one must follow these steps only if recovering the deleted WhatsApp messages is important enough to risk potentially losing some data. Krishi Jagran is not responsible for any loss of data so proceed at your own risk.

To turn on chat backup, open WhatsApp, go to Settings > go to Chats > tap on Chat backup. Here, you can set up the frequency of your chat backup between never, daily, weekly or monthly, or you can even do a manual backup as well. Additionally, you'll have to select the Google account where you'd want the backup to be stored if you use an Android smartphone.

If you're an iPhone user, go to Settings within WhatsApp > Chats > Chat Backup, where you can select the Auto Backup frequency or use Back Up Now to manually initiate a backup to iCloud.

Check how to recover deleted WhatsApp chats using different methods:

Method to Restore deleted WhatsApp chats via cloud backup-

• If you have deleted chats accidentally, there's a chance that the chat was present on your cloud backup. Let's say your Google Drive or iCloud backup took place at midnight and in the morning you accidentally deleted a chat. The cloud backup still has the chat and you can restore it. Follow this-

• Uninstall WhatsApp from your Android smartphone or iPhone.

• Reinstall WhatsApp and set it up with your phone number.

• Once the app is set up, you will get a prompt asking you to restore messages from a cloud backup. This backup would be from Google Drive on Android, and iCloud on iOS. Tap Restore.

• This will bring back the messages that you had accidentally deleted. Note that if you got a message after your most recent cloud backup and deleted it, there's no way to recover it.

Method to restore deleted WhatsApp chats via Android's local backup-

• Kindly note that, this method does not work on iOS. If your Google Drive backup has overwritten the deleted messages, then follow these steps.

• Go to your phone's File Manager (download Google's Files app if you can't find this app).

• Now go to the WhatsApp folder > Database. The Database folder contains all the WhatsApp backup files that are stored locally on your phone.

• Select the file msgstore.db.crypt12 and rename it to msgstore_BACKUP.db.crypt12. This is your most recent backup file and you need to rename it so as to prevent it from being overwritten. (If things go wrong, you can always rename this file to its original name and restore)

• Now you will see a bunch of files here in the format msgstore-YYYY-MM-DD.1.db.crypt12. These are your older WhatsApp backups, you can pick the most recent one and rename it to msgstore.db.crypt12.

• Here's the tricky part: you need to open Google Drive on your smartphone, tap the hamburger icon (the three vertical lines) > Backups. Now delete the WhatsApp backup there. This will force your phone to restore from the local backup instead.

• Now, uninstall WhatsApp and then reinstall it. Set it up and once done, you will get a prompt to restore chats from a local backup, considering you don't have a chat backup on the cloud.

• Tap on Restore and that's it. You'll get your deleted chats back.

Credit- Gadgets 360