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?
It’s going to take some time. I’ve been there as have plenty of people who came to me for support when it happened to them.
While right now you’re thinking of it in terms of loss, you can also celebrate the lightness that comes from not having the data anymore.
There’s more…
What was the funniest thing you remember that was in there?
Now consider that you remember it. You don’t need to check, you remember the things that made that memory funny.
So, take a deep breath, add it to the list of stupid things you’ve done to date that didn’t kill you and then go and drink a glass of water and go for a walk.
This too will pass.
you can also celebrate the lightness that comes from not having the data anymore.
For years after my son’s suicide I backed up our texts. From one daily android update to the next, phone after phone. I always bought a phone that I knew I could root so I could ensure the ability to restore these backups. Then I got careless during one rom flash and lost them. It was a huge weight lifted when that happened. I realized that I had never once gone and reread any of them since the week after his death. And the constant backing up caused so much stress.
I was in a similar situation at the end of last year losing all WhatsApp chats dating back to ~2016.
I got a new iPhone 15 Pro (and didn’t keep it, but that’s another story), wanting to upgrade from my 13 Pro.
Now normally, I just transfer all data from the old phone to the new phone which always worked fine. But WhatsApp has its own backup mechanism, which normally works in addition to the regular iCloud backup. But a year ago or two they introduced end-to-end encrypted backups, which I enabled. Apparently this blacklists WhatsApp chats from being backed up to iCloud as part of the standard iPhone backup (even when WhatsApp is explicitly enabled in the backup settings) and also blacklists them from being transferred via direct phone transfer for some reason only some developer at Meta knows.
So, that meant the new chats weren’t on the new iPhone 15, but I didn’t know that yet. I then launched WhatsApp on the iPhone 15, going through verifying my phone number again, which is the normal procedure. It then asked me to generate a new encryption phrase, and this should have been the first sign something went wrong. Basic WhatsApp configuration apparently transferred just fine, which is why WhatsApp never asked to restore the backup it made. This was my first failure, as I didn’t suspect anything and simply set a new encryption phrase. Sure enough, WhatsApp wiped the existing (WhatsApp specific) backup off of iCloud and started a new (empty) backup. Apparently WhatsApp is designed to only support one backup per iCloud account/phone number.
The “old” iPhone conveniently asked if I wanted to factory reset/wipe it after the transfer was successful. This was my second failure, as I simply confirmed the prompt, thinking the transfer was completed (which it was, except for the WhatsApp chats) and also thinking I had the iCloud backup of the phone (which I had, but that excluded the chats as well).
My third failure then was not having any local backup of the phone. I thought I had a backup that was at most a few weeks old on my Mac, but apparently I deleted it and I also moved to a new NAS recently and didn’t transfer the Time Machine backup of the Mac, so it wasn’t in that backup either (I wiped the old NAS).
So it was a chain of UX nightmares/stupid design on Meta’s part and my own stupidity on multiple occasions.
I somewhat cared that my chats were gone as they were a decent database for actually useful stuff and WhatsApp is searchable quite fast, so I frequently used it to find older stuff like links, photos or documents. There were some more personal chats that I’d have like to keep as well. I actually got some chat history back by asking one guy I share a lot of groups with to export their shared group chats and send them to me. I also got a more personal chat back from a person I’m close with.
Most chats are still missing and gone for good, but I’m mostly over that as I shouldn’t live in the past anyway. I also tried contacting Apple to restore iCloud to an older state, but as the WhatsApp backup isn’t on the actual user-facing “iCloud Drive” there’s no way to recover this data.
What bothered me more back then and sometimes still bothers me is how my own mistakes contributed to losing all my chat history. Just not fucking up one single part of this would’ve resulted in me having a working backup of all chats/a working live version on the old phone. It was completely unnecessary to instantly wipe the old phone for example. I absolutely hate fucking something up that I’m not able to fix/do anything about.
One thing I can tell you is to focus on what lessons you take away from this. What I took from this is to of course be more careful, but also to not trust proprietary/cloud-based backups. In the back of my head I always wanted to backup my iCloud Photo Library locally to my NAS, but I never did it. I searched for an app that automatically backs up original versions of all photos/videos to my Synology NAS and I now have a regular, automated, append-only backup of all my iCloud photos. I backup personal data from my NAS to an external SSD weekly, and have a separate cloud backup of the most important data running every night.
Then there’s also time. Time lets you get past most things. Sure, you’ll probably think back once in a while and think “oh damn”, but then you’ll move on the next second and it’ll be fine. Trust me.
If you want to prevent something like this in the future, use a tool like Syncthing to automatically sync the local backup to other devices like a computer.
Its not a backup if it doesn’t follow the 321 Rules of Backing Up
The 3-2-1 backup rule is a strategy that recommends having three copies of your data backed up. The first copy is your primary critical data backup. The others are two redundant backup copies. You should use two different methods to back up your data, such as local and online backups. Then, you should have one copy designated for disaster recovery.
