By now we all have a messaging app on our Android smartphone to be able to chat with our contacts. Among the many messaging applications available on the Play Store, one that has been enormously successful is undoubtedly Whatsapp and I believe that more or less all smartphone owners have had the opportunity to try it sooner or later.
To use messaging apps like Whatsapp you just need an internet connection, then you can do practically anything, from exchanging text messages to sending calls and video calls, sending image files, voice files, documents, etc. all from a single application. Whatsapp is a very simple messaging app to use, which has now become for many extremely useful and an inseparable thing for modern communications.
The best thing about WhatsApp is that it is easy to learn and therefore has been able to be used by people of all ages, in fact, it is not only the kids who make use of these applications but also the users who are part of a generation now not so young and who do not want to go crazy with functions too complicated to learn. Whatsapp is therefore an app created to be used and learned by everyone in a simple way, consequently, millions of people use it every day and exchange chat messages for any reason.
However, the day comes when you decide to change your smartphone and in this case, you ask yourself- what happens to the old Whatsapp chats that I have stored on the old smartphone? You can transfer them to the new phone and in this guide, we will see in fact how to transfer Whatsapp chats from one phone to another.
Those who use Whatsapp exchange lots of messages with their contacts and these conversations are grouped into individual chats that are carried out with each contact. If these chats are not deleted manually, unless you use ephemeral messages, they remain stored on your phone. If you intend to change your smartphone but do not want to lose some important chats that you have exchanged with your contacts, you can rest assured as it is possible to transfer Whatsapp chats from one phone to another using the backup system made available by the messaging app. This will ensure you don’t miss any chats even if you switch phones as you will be able to restore the backup to the new device. But let’s see in detail how to transfer Whatsapp chats from one phone to another:
How to transfer Whatsapp chats from one phone to another- backup messages through the use of Google Drive
First, activate the internet connection on your phone, then log in to Whatsapp on your old smartphone WhatsApp allows you to create backups of messages and multimedia files to be uploaded to the Google Drive cloud. All you need is a Google account connected to Google Drive and Whatsapp will automatically take care of backing up your chats. Creating a backup is the simplest way to transfer messages exchanged in chats to your new smartphone. When you install WhatsApp on your new device and log in with your account using your phone number, you will be asked by the app if you intend to restore the backup messages that were saved to the cloud. Follow the steps given below to make sure the backup to Google Drive is enabled:
- Now press the menu icon that you find at the top right of the screen (icon with three vertical dots)
- Now select the Settings item from the window that opens
- Now tap the Chat item and then Chat Backup
- Now, in the settings of Google Drive, make sure you have a Google Account connected. If not, simply tap on the Google Accounts option and a list of Google accounts that your device is connected to will appear. Select an account of your choice where you want to save the chat backups
- You can also change the backup settings and set them to be able to perform an automatic backup at regular intervals which could be a day, a week, or a month. Those who wish can instead perform the backup manually
- The user who also wants the videos that have been received on WhatsApp chats to be backed up must activate the switch next to the entry including videos
- If you have performed the above steps you should have a backup of your chats uploaded to Google Drive, so now you can rest assured that your chat messages can easily be transferred to your new smartphone
- When you install WhatsApp on your new phone, you will be prompted via an onscreen text message to restore your messages and media files from Google Drive. Depending on the number of chats and messages you need to restore to your new smartphone it may take some time, particularly if you have also backed up your media files
How to transfer Whatsapp chats from one phone to another- perform a manual backup by saving the file locally
The first thing you need to do is access the Whatsapp app, then press the Settings item by tapping the icon with the three dots. Although the method where Google Drive is used is quite simple to use and fully functional, it requires an internet connection and those with a limited data plan may realize that continuous backup on Google Drive, especially if videos are also made, can consume a lot of data. If you have a limited internet connection and can’t afford to waste a lot of data uploading and downloading chats again, you can also manually copy the backup files to your old device’s local storage and then transfer them to your new phone. To force Whatsapp to store chats on your phone’s local storage, you need to make sure that no Google account is linked to it. Once done, follow the below-given steps to manually backup your chats and messages:
- Now go to Chat and select the item Chat backup
- Now press the Backup button
- If you do not have any Google account connected to WhatsApp, the app will create a backup file and save it on the local internal memory of your smartphone, more precisely in the WhatsApp Database folder
- Now simply locate this file and copy it to your new phone. To do this, connect your device to a computer via a USB cable and access the internal memory of your Android smartphone
- Then look for the Whatsapp folder and select the Database folder
- You will find a file with the name like the one shown in the example “msgstore-2020-12-14.db.crypt12“. If there are multiple files of this type, select the one with the latest creation date and copy it to your computer
- Now on your new phone, install Whatsapp but don’t open it
- Connect the new device to the computer and copy the file used in the example “msgstore-2020-12-14.db.crypt12” in the WhatsApp> Database folder of the new smartphone. If you notice that the Database folder is not present you will need to create a new one
- Once the backup file has been copied to the Database folder on the new smartphone, start the Whatsapp app and wait a few seconds. Whatsapp will automatically detect the backup of the chats and show you a message on the screen from which you will be able to restore the messages of the old chats that you have saved from the other phone. Just tap the Reset button and the messages will be downloaded to your new smartphone
The content seen above in this guide can be used for users who want to transfer Whatsapp chats from one phone to another, but both devices must have the Android operating system installed. And who instead decides to switch from iPhone to Android? In this case, I recommend reading the guide on how to transfer chat backups from iPhone to Android.
I really hope that the information you found in this guide was useful to you and that you managed to transfer Whatsapp chats to your new smartphone. Whatsapp is one of the most used apps in the world and now most of our conversations take place via Whatsapp, consequently, if someone has been using the same smartphone for several years, they could have saved thousands of messages in chats. If these chats are important to you, it would be a shame if these messages were lost when switching to a new phone, but with Whatsapp backups, you will be able to easily transfer chats from one device to another. See you in the next guide.
