[sdflhasjd]

WhatsApp backups are a bit of an anti-feature, as I found out while trying to ditch the app after the recent policy update.

1) The backup can only be made to Google drive, you cannot create a manual backup to a location of your chosing

2) The backup is created in a secret folder that cannot be accessed by the user

3) The backup is deleted if you delete your account. (not much of a backup, eh?)

4) You can only create per-channel exports, but this won't export the entire chat, it will export up to ~12MB of recent media, and ignore the rest, silently. WhatsApp would only share the last 40 messages of a 4-year-old chat because the last few messages contained a few images.

[londons_explore]

I believe there is still an (undocumented, unofficial) way to backup to the SD card. The backup is still encrypted tho, and can only be restored to the same whatsapp account as created it.

[ycombinete]

Interesting. I just created a 900MB backup of a chat history, on my iOS WhatsApp, that appears to have all messages and all data.

[tinus_hn]

Being an iOS device it probably doesn’t ‘backup’ to Google Drive so this story may not apply

[ycombinete]

yeah, on ios whatsapp backs up the data to icloud

[Denvercoder9]

WhatsApp also creates (encrypted) backups in the WhatsApp/Databases folder on your internal storage. Aside from a single line displaying the time of the last local backup in the backup settings it's not really well-documented though.

[jsmith99]

I can't find any source for this 12MB limit? Backups I've restored (Android) seen to contain all media although I haven't checked in detail.

[Denvercoder9]

That point was talking about the "Export Chat" function (which creates a medialess text file), not the backup function.