I was so confident that WhatsApp was backing itself up to Google ever since I got my new pixel but I just wasn’t. Then yesterday I factory reset my phone to fix something else and I lost it all. Years worth of chats from so many times in my past just aren’t there, all my texts with my mom and my family, group chats with old friends… I can’t even look at the app anymore, I’ll never use Whatsapp as much as I used to. I just don’t feel right with this change. There’s no way to get those chats back and now it doesn’t feel like there’s any point backing up WhatsApp now! I really wanna cry like this is so unfair!! And all I had to do was check Whatsapp before I did a factory reset… the TINIEST THING I could have done and prevented this and I didn’t fucking do it!!!
How do I get past this?
The WhatsApp backups are stored in an area of your Google account that you can’t access, so you can’t really test without a new phone (or deleting all your data).
You can’t do anything yourself with those backups apart from delete or disable them:
I don’t know if this is country specific, but I can just download all my chats as .txt files and do so regularly, as I don’t trust Meta not to delete anything and only keeping the last x years or something like that.
I don’t see how - is from within WhatsApp? I can’t see anything by browsing on the phone (Android) or by connecting to a computer.
edit: I can see how to export a single chat from Settings > Chats > Chat backup but not how to get it all without a thousand clicks.
