Accidentally Deleted Your WhatsApp Chat History? Here’s How to Restore It

Touchscreen devices are great, but can also be frustrating. A simple tap on the wrong option, for example, and your WhatsApp chat history is gone.
You meant to hit Add a conversation shortcut, but instead you tapped Delete chat. Then you clicked “Yes” without thinking!

Your chats are gone now. leaving you without a record. How do you get them back?

Restoring Whatsapp Chats

It’s surprisingly simple to recover anything less than seven days old: just uninstall the app, then reinstall it. WhatsApp automatically creates a backup of your chat data everyday at 4 am system time, and this data is stored on the SD card of your Android phone. When you re-install the app, you are prompted to restore your message history. Simply tap Restore and everything less than seven days old is restored.
Done.

On iOS, the process is even simpler. After accidentally deleting a message thread, just give your phone a shake and WhatsApp will ask if you’d like to undo the Archive action. Tap on Yes and the message thread will magically reappear.

Bear in mind that this “undo” trick only works for the last deleted message thread. So if you accidentally deleted more than one thread, it will only recover the most recent one.

Recovering Older Chats

Chats older than seven days old are slightly more difficult to restore.
This method only works if WhatsApp is set to back up to the local internal memory or SD card. So if you’ve set it to also backup to Google Drive, you’ll need to disconnect that first.
Remove your microSD card from your phone and insert it into a reader connected to your computer. Then navigate to the Database folder in the SD card – the exact route is:

/sdcard/WhatsApp/Databases

In the Databases folder, you will see several files: these are your chat backup files. You will notice that they are saved with names like “msgstore-YYYY-MM-DD.1.db.crypt” where “YYYY-MM-DD” is the year, month and date respectively.