How to recover your Whatsapp chat history

SUMMARY: the solution in my case was to just leave the phone at rest for several hours, waiting for it to download my 25 GB of iCloud conversations. Explanation below:

This is off-topic, but my Whatsapp chat history is an important part of my life and I would hate to lose it. I recently had to restart my phone, and I almost gave up on the process of recovering said data. Hopefully, my experience can be useful for someone else.

I’m gonna write this quick and dirty and some details have faded from my memory already, but if you encounter a problem or something that’s unclear let me know and I’ll try to figure it out with you. (BTW, this FAQ is pretty much useless).

When trying to recover the chat history from an iCloud backup, a lot of users report that the process fails. Or that the Whatsapp App never finishes downloading, or problems related to this.

I believe that the problem that many users face is caused by a mix of user error and poor design. In my case what happened was that Whatsapp would take FOREVER to install, and it seemed to me that it was stuck, so I would go ahead and try several ways to “force” it to install, like pausing and unpausing, but ultimately deleting the app and downloading it again from the app store. I believe this last step is the culprit of the problem, I suspect that some credential that links your Whatsapp instance to the iCloud backup is deleted in this process and so the fresh Whatsapp copy you download from the App Store can’t access your chat backup.

So, with this in mind, the solution in my case was to just leave the phone at rest for several hours, waiting for it to download my 25 GB of iCloud conversations. It seemed it was stuck, but it eventually finished downloading Whatsapp, and my iCloud data was there.

I’m going to lay down a couple of details and assumptions about my process, and about how iOS works. They may not all be accurate:

• Whatsapp is one of the first apps on my home screen.
• I believe iOS reinstalls apps from iCloud following the order in which they appear on the home screen
• Whatsapp (and its backup) weighting >25 GB took several hours to install, effectively blocking the rest of the apps installing as well
• I’m not sure if pausing and unpausing the install of Whatsapp or other apps will affect the iCloud sync process
• I was running iOS 13 in an iPhone X
• I believe I disabled the screen turning off, and left the phone plugged in and with the screen on for the whole process.

Hope this helps!