Table of contents:
You are quite likely to use WhatsApp. More than 2 billion people around the world do it. And, day by day, communications are established in the form of long conversations, either between two people or through the sometimes hated groups. There are times when we might want to recover conversations we have had in the WhatsApp application. The reasons may be different and, on this occasion, we are not here to judge anyone, but to give practical and simple solutions. What can we do if we want to recover some conversations that we have had on WhatsApp but they no longer appear in the chat room?
In the method that we are going to teach you there is a small drawback: we can only recover WhatsApp conversations that are one week old. If what you are looking for falls within that period, you have it very easy, since WhatsApp automatically makes a backup of all the conversations you have had over the last seven days. But, what if you had not previously activated the automatic save function for conversations? No problem, you can still locate it. We tell you how.
How to find and restore WhatsApp backup
To recover the backup of the conversations held on WhatsApp during the last week you will need a file explorer. Mobile phone manufacturers usually pre-install them in the operating system, so you just have to look for the corresponding application, under the name of 'File Explorer'. If you can't find it, in the Play Store you have a great assortment of these, like the ones we show you here. Once you have it located, you must navigate through it, locating a specific route. For the tutorial we have used one of the lightest and simplest applications in the entire Store, Files, developed by Google itself, which, in addition, can come in handy to free your mobile from occupied space.
- Once inside the file explorer, we must look for the 'WhatsApp' folder .
- We have three different folders. We enter 'Databases'.
- Here we see the list of backups that WhatsApp has been making automatically. We can see that the date appears in each of them, except for the last one. Choose which one you want to recover.
- Now, we must look at the last copy that appears, whose name differs from the rest. This is the most recent backup. Its name is usually 'msgstore.db.crypt12'. If the name of yours is different, remember it well, write it down somewhere so you don't forget it. It is important.
- Now the road splits in two. We can replace the name of the most recent copy with the one we want to restore from. If, for example, we choose to retrieve the conversations from May 12, we must name that file that of the most recent copy, that is, replace 'msgstore.db.crypt12' with 'msgstore-2020-05-12.1. db.crypt.12 '. If we choose this route, we would be loading the most recent copy, keep that in mind.
- The other, safer way to go is to rename the file of the most recent copy ('msgstore.db.crypt12') to one with a false date. We choose for example day 1 ('msgstore-2020-05-01.1.db.crypt.12'). Now, we must rename the file of the conversations that we want to recover (in this case of May 12) and we would give it the name that had the most recent copy ('msgstore.db.crypt12'). This way, we would keep it with a false date.
- To change the name of a file, you just have to press and hold it, then click on the three-point menu and, finally, access 'change name'.
Next, we uninstall WhatsApp. When we reinstall it, it will restore the conversations of the 12th and thus we can locate it in a simple way.
