Transfer Your WhatsApp Chat

WhatsApp is one of the most popular messaging apps out there. But if you get a new phone and transfer your WhatsApp account to it, your old messages don't automatically transfer. This tutorial explains how to transfer WhatsApp conversations to a new device, so you can pick up your chats where you left off. 

Google Drive backup and restore
Newer versions of WhatsApp include automatic Google Drive backups, which makes the process of transferring your WhatsApp chat history between phones even easier than before.

You simply tap the trio of dots at the top left of the screen and go to Settings > Chats and calls > Chat backup.

From here, you can back up manually, or set it to automatically back up as regularly as you like. When WhatsApp is reinstalled, it will prompt you to recover your chats and multimedia from Google Drive.

whats app backup chat

The ability to make Google Drive backups in the latest version of WhatsApp makes life easier. / © AndroidPIT

Manually backing up chats and restoring them

Open the Settings menu of WhatsApp, tap on Chats and calls and then tap Chat backup.

whatsapp backup 2018

Tap the three dots (options) button. Go to Settings > Chats > Chat backup. / © AndroidPIT

If your old Android phone and new one both primarily use an external SD card for memory, simply take the SD card out of your old phone, and put it into your new one

For phones that save to internal memory, such as most newer devices, connect your smartphone to your PC via USB cable, and navigate to the internal memory of the device to the folder WhatsApp / Database.

This is where all the backup files are saved with a date. They will look something like "msgstore-2013-05-29.db.crypt". Copy the file with the latest creation date (it will have a different name from the automatic backups created, mine is "msgstore.db.crypt8") onto your PC in an easy to find location (such as your desktop).