If you’ve bought a shiny new phone recently, you might have noticed something’s not quite right when you fire up WhatsApp on the new device. Even though your chats have been restored from a backup, some of the messages from the past day or so have gone AWOL. Why have you got missing WhatsApp messages after changing phones? And is there anything you can do to get those missing messages back?
How WhatsApp backup works
WhatsApp chats can be backed up to either Google Drive or iCloud, meaning that you don’t lose your entire message history when you switch phones. However, by default, the backup is only set to run on a daily basis. So, if you switch to a new phone but your backup hasn’t run for the past 20 hours, you’re going to lose all those messages sent/received in the interim when you switch to the new phone.
There is a way to avoid this problem and that’s to force WhatsApp to perform a backup immediately before you switch to a new device.
To do this:
- Open WhatsApp on your phone, click the three dots in the top-right of the screen and choose Settings
- Click Chats and then Chat backup
- At the top of the screen, you should see a message showing when your last backup was taken (assuming you’ve previously set one up). Both local and Google Drive/iTunes backup times will be listed
- To force your phone to take a backup now, simply hit the Backup button and wait for the process to complete
Is there any way to restore missing WhatsApp messages?
If you’ve already switched phones, WhatsApp will have been deactivated on your old phone, because you can only have a WhatsApp account running on one device at a time.
You could try putting the SIM card back into the old phone, reactivating WhatsApp there, and see if the missing messages are stored in the phone’s memory. They should be there. You can then perform the backup procedure highlighted above.
Before you put the SIM card back in the new phone, delete WhatsApp from that phone. Now put the SIM card back in and reinstall the app. It should then restore from your new backup, complete with those previously missing messages.
Where is WhatsApp backed up on Google Drive?
I’ve just followed your instructions completely and my chats haven’t restored. There’s no message to ask if I want to restore. I’ve installed and uninstalled on my old and new phones several times and it’s just not working! Please can you help?
Worked for me, you don’t have to swap over your SIM if you are on WiFi. Just enter your number into your old phone WhatsApp. You have to wait 30 minutes before it will let you log into your new phone and retrieve messages.
Worked for me, you don’t have to swap over your SIM if you are on WiFi. Just enter your number into your old phone WhatsApp. You have to wait 30 minutes before it will let you log into your new phone and retrieve messages.
This finally worked for me after trying for like 2 hours. I did also have put my sim back in the old phone and choose to back it up to my newer gmail account. The other one didn’t have eough space for the back up to go all the way through. Thanks so much for the solution, it was a HUGE relief.