How to recover deleted WhatsApp messages

Deleting WhatsApp messages is an increasingly normal action, either unintentionally or because we simply no longer wanted to have them in our phone's memory. Whatever the reason you deleted the message from that conversation, it is quite likely that you have regretted it and want to recover it.

Don't worry, WhatsApp makes a backup every day during the early hours of the morning. This copy is saved in a folder called «Databases» and it is possible to retrieve any message as long as no more than 7 days have passed. 

If deleted messages are less than 7 days old

Retrieving messages that are less than 7 days old is really easy to do. Just uninstall and reinstall the app. In this way, during the initial configuration, the application itself will ask you if you want to restore the backup.

When you restore that copy, message history will also be restored, including all those that have been deleted during the previous week.

The only problem with all this is that we don't have a backup of the messages. So just for reasons like this, it is strongly recommended to carry out a WhatsApp backup daily. We never know when we will need old information that we wanted to delete.

If the deleted messages are older than 7 days

What can we do if the message to be recovered is well over a week old? In this case it is still possible to recover said message, however, the process will be much more difficult to perform.

To start we have to copy the contents of the WhatsApp “Database” folder to a folder on our computer. To do it, we just have to connect our phone to our PC and make a copy manually. Once done, we proceed to uninstall WhatsApp.

With the WhatsApp application uninstalled, we go back to our computer and we have to delete the “msgstore.db.crypt7” or “msgstore.db.crypt8” file. These files are located in the folder that was copied earlier. Finally, you have to rename the backup to “msgstore-Year-Month-Day.1.db.crypt7″. The “Year-Month-Day” data mainly correspond to the specific date where the backup was made in which those deleted messages were saved.

Now we only have to reconnect the mobile to the computer and copy the renamed file in the previous step to the "WhatsApp / Database" path in the internal memory of our phone. !! Congratulations!! Now we can see the messages that we had deleted and do as if nothing had happened. 

Leave a comment