Whatsapp as we all know is the most popular and widely used messaging app in the world at the moment.
There are several other messaging apps out there that are not even known due to the popularity of WhatsApp.
Almost anyone who owns a smartphone has the app on their device and it does not even come preinstalled on these devices.
The messaging is owned by Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook after it was purchased for more than $19 billion from its original creators. The app boasts about 1.5 billion active users around the world.
Whatsapp comes with a lot of features after it was bought by Facebook and new features get added with each update that the app goes through. However, we are going to look at how you can retrieve a message that has been deleted on WhatsApp.
That is when someone sends you a message and then they delete the message before you get to see what they were trying to say. It can also be that you may have accidentally deleted an important message and you need that message back.
We are going to look at how you can restore your WhatsApp message that has been deleted on both IOS and android.
Note that you can only retrieve backup messages. This means that you will lose any message that came after your last backup because they are not part of the backup. So now, let us look at the ways you can recover messages.
Table of Contents
Local Storage
You can recover deleted messages from your local storage. Please follow the steps below.
- Go to your settings, to WhatsApp, and then to the database. This is where all the backup files are stored locally on your phone.
- Go to ‘msgstore.db.crpyt12’ and long press on it. Rename it to ‘msgstore_backup.db.crypt12’. this will prevent it from being overwritten
- Now, choose the recent backup file and rename it to ‘msgstore.db.crypt12’
- Now, go to your google drive and tap on the three vertical lines. This can be found on the top right corner
- Choose ‘backups’ and then delete your WhatsApp backup there
- Now, uninstall your WhatsApp and then install it again. You will be asked to restore messages from local storage during the installation since there is no cloud storage now
- Choose ‘msgstore.db.crypt12’ and then tap on restore
Your message will then be restored and you would see the particular messages that you lost have returned. Note that this method can only be done on android. So IOS users cannot use this method.
Recovery Via Cloud Storage
You can also recover messages from the cloud if you have allowed cloud backup. Please follow the steps below to see how you can do that. this method can be used on both android and IOS.
- Uninstall your WhatsApp from your device
- Now, install the WhatsApp again with the same phone number
- You can now restore your messages from the cloud. You will be asked to restore messages from the cloud and you just tap on ‘restore’ to allow it
Your previous backed-up messages will then be restored from your cloud backup storage. You should however note that messages that came after a backup cannot be restored because they were not backed up yet.
Also, note that messages that came and were deleted after a backup cannot be restored since they did not get backed up.
- Conclusion
So these are the ways through which you can recover lost messages on WhatsApp. As you can see, they involve having to reinstall your WhatsApp before you can get those messages you need back.
Whatsapp has not offered any feature that allows one to recover deleted messages because, well, that would go against people’s privacy. So this is the only method you can use for now.
I hope this article has been useful to you if you have been looking for ways to recover messages on your WhatsApp. Let me know what you think in the comment section and do not forget to like this article.
