Hacker News Reader

Anyone know of a way to backup everything from whatsapp, including video and voice messages? I have 5 years of messages between me and my wife on whatsapp i'd like to preserve some how before moving off.

View on HN

Video and voice should simply be on the "shared storage" ("/sdcard/" - not an actual SD card) on Android.

There should also be a copy of the messages database, and I'm sure there is some open source app to decrypt it somewhere.

Seems to be possible unless you live in Germany, just follow this guide [0]. If in a EU country, I wonder if you could also submit a data subject access request (I'm not too familiar on GDPR).

[0] https://faq.whatsapp.com/android/chats/how-to-save-your-chat...

Why wouldn't it be possible if you live in Germany?

I don't know. I live in Germany and the files are also stored in /sdcard/WhatsApp/ And also the message databases are under there, ready to be copied and decrypted.

You can also access the unencrypted messagestore database, if you have root access. For me, it is located at : /data/data/com.whatsapp/databases/msgstore.db

On iOS you can't export chats anymore if you're located in Germany.

https://ga.de/news/digitale-welt/gericht-verbietet-whatsapp-...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com