Link: https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1vf2rvu/whatsapp_banning_people_left_and_right_with_data/

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The original was posted on /r/datahoarder by /u/dr100 on 2026-08-04 06:54:05+00:00.

At this point the WhatsApp sub is overrun with 2 issues:

(1) people getting their account locked for absolutely no reason - probably WA tweaked their anti-spam with a sprinkle of AI that went crazy. However, a side-effect is that even if the data is on the phone (nice choice from Whatsapp not to bother with it, plus you can't even GDPR them on that, they never had it) you don't have access to it (even if it is your data, on your device). After your account is "reviewed" and hopefully the access is granted (if you can receive the SMS at all, as you need to completely login and register that device again, and probably WA itself is blocked from SMS spamming various providers after this fiasco) the app might or might not properly recognize the data you already have. If things don't go well you'll have to restore the cloud backup. For this, see below.

(2) This is Android specific: the backups just get stuck (when making a backup, on the -usually daily- schedule or manually). Also, the backups get stuck when restoring (unknown if it's because they were bad in the first place from the backup/upload not working, or if there's some bad code used in both places). There is a HUGE number of people that think they'll solve the I CAN'T FINISH A BACKUP problem by nuking the original and ... restoring from backup! Note that this isn't anything fancy like being able to pick which backup to restore from a number of previous ones or anything, it's just one (one you can easily overwrite with an empty one even when things go well) and on any error it's all gone (there aren't any files you can see, massage, anything, it's just completely not working, all lost).

There's also some issue related to sharing pictures, which might be related to (1) but it isn't critical in terms of data loss, it's more relevant about the general state of the service.

Anyway, while the service itself might have backups that aren't deserving the name, I was always puzzled by the state of the tools we (mostly do NOT) have to handle backing up and exploring our WhatsApp data. While I know there might be some which say "it's just some chats" and have no interest whatsoever to keep that most people I know in person and online have a VERY strong desire to preserve that. For some it's all they have and care about in terms of digital data.

With WhatsApp more popular than mostly anything except breathing one would expect to have a healthy ecosystem of tools to handle your data and a huge number of web pages, youtube videos and similar documenting for anyone how to perform any basic operation or use various tools. But no, we barely have some tools to perform basic workflows (like decrypting the messagestore.db.crypt) and to explore the chats, some in abandonment that they don't work with newer db schema (and by newer I mean 2022 or so) and need to have some changes to it. Most would barely have half a dozen people or so participating, I mean not even as code contributors but as people just asking something relevant on github or providing some insightful feedback. You have more YouTube videos about installing TrueNas than about properly reading your WhatsApp backup. Of course, one might say for TrueNas there are more technical users used to make documentation and whatnot, but really with the humongous install base of WhatsApp it'll have everything, a large number of programmers, and documentation writers, and Nobel prize winners, and everything (including thieves and scammers, anything). Still, you can barely find anything, both because there aren't too many things to start with, and because nobody is talking about them!

TLDR

• on Android keep a good, independent, local copy of the visible WhatsApp directory from Internal Storage/Android/media/ (on much older Android/Whatsapp might be directly under Internal Storage beside your regular DCIM directory). Media is accessible directly, chats are encrypted - the sane way to get the key is just to use E2EEncryption with the auto generated hex key (not the password). Note that one of the contributing factors to (2) is said to be E2EE as people reported success when flipping it, but I strongly recommend to leave it on, more, to periodically check if your key is still good just in case (you can decrypt offline the .crypt15 files if you have the key).
• needless to say if your backup doesn't work DON'T MESS WITH THE ORIGINAL. Save the above directory and the key.