WhatsApps: How to recover removed messages by mistake

As far as technology has advanced, it’s still incredibly annoying when you accidentally delete your messages. Fortunately, despite this flaw when you tap on “delete” instead of “add conversation”, it’s not the end of the world.

There are a couple of ways to recover your deleted messages, with one which is incredibly simple.

If the messages you deleted are less than 7 days old, you just need to uninstall and then reinstall WhatsApp (a link to it is as the bottom of this page). The reason for this is that WhatsApp will automatically create a backup of your data each day. Providing you reinstall the app within 7 days you’ll be prompted to restore your chats, and anything less than 7 days will reappear. 

If it’s outside of this window things get more complicated.

First you need your WhatsApp to be set to backup to your local memory if you have it set to Google Drive you’ll need to disable that. Then remove your microSD and insert it into a card reader which hopefully will be connected to your computer.

Then navigate to /sdcard/WhatsApp/Databases.

You’ll find all of your chats green with names that look something like ” msgstore-YYYY-MM-DD.1.dB.crypt”.

You’ll firstly want to rename “msgstore.db.crypt” and add something similar to “OLD” or “OTHER” to the end of it. Then find the file with the date you want to restore and rename it as “msgstore.db.crypt”. Then place your SD back into your device and uninstall and reinstall your WhatsApp.

It’ll ask you to restore your messages and whichever file you renamed will be added to your chats. You can repeat the process to get whichever message you want to restore.

Hopefully you want to restore messages that are less than 7 days old as it’s the much easier option.