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Samsung A54, which had WhatsApp installed with two phone numbers, broke down. Google Drive contains backups of both the phone itself and WhatsApp chats (size 3.1 GB). I'm trying to set one phone number on Samsung A7 as a second number. WhatsApp detects the backup but cannot restore it due to an error. If you choose to restore chats from an old copy, the recovery process holds on. This happens with each of the two phone numbers, that is, it does not depend on the size of the backup. At the same time, if you skip restoring chats, WhatsApp still restores everything except chats in the amount of 3.1 GB.

Has anyone met a similar situation and is there any way to restore chat history?

P.S. There is no option to reinstall WhatsApp, because there is no access to the main number on the Samsung A7 and no way to receive SMS.

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    Only one of the previous phone numbers was registered to WhatsApp, typical the main one (SIM1). Unless you migrated it to another number while have access to both the old and the new, you can only access backups from the original number.
    – ChanganAuto
    Commented Apr 1 at 23:41
  • @ChanganAutu, why not write it up an an answer.
    – Rohit Gupta
    Commented Apr 1 at 23:43
  • What do you mean with "WhatsApp still restores everything except chats"? If you are referring to media files, that's normal, those are not encrypted when stored in Google Drive.
    – Andrea Lazzarotto
    Commented Apr 11 at 10:05

2 Answers 2

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Your issue is that you cannot decrypt the backup

Encrypted WhatsApp backups (e.g. .crypt14) need a key to be restored. Said key is generated by the WhatsApp servers when you perform SMS verification.

This applies to both the DB backups found on the "main storage" (formerly SD card) and inside Google Drive, as they use the same form of encryption.

Given that the key is generated by receiving an SMS from WhatsApp, the only way to restore from those backups is receiving the SMS verification code.

You cannot "break" the encryption used to protect those files.

Sometimes there are issues in which you might have trouble fetching the data from Google Drive. In those cases you might want to download the backup manually from the cloud.

You can use several tools, such as Whapa.

Let me reiterate that you still need the WhatsApp decryption key.

The key can be requested from WhatsApp servers via SMS or call verification, by several methods. One method is to install WhatsApp on a rooted phone (or emulator), start the setup process and then access the key files. Some programs automate these steps, such as WhatsDump, but they can also be performed manually by just having a basic experience with the ADB command line.

After you have got your hands on the decryption key, you can use some tools to decrypt the backup and get a readable msgstore.db file (which should ideally be restorable on a different account as well).

You can use several tools again, e.g. wa-crypt-tools. Again, from the website of the project:

For decryption, you NEED the key file or the 64-characters long key.

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As mentioned by someone, the error detected by WhatsApp is probably due to the incompatibility of the phone numbers, unless you rectify it. As I grasp, the phone number your Google backup is tied to is different from the one you inserted in the Samsung A7.

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