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Comment by saidinesh5 | Hacker News Reader

Not exactly related, but does anyone know what's the best way to backup WhatsApp data on an Android phone without using Google drive these days?

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There is a WhatsApp folder on your phone, which contains the database of messages. You can just backup the entire folder by any standard backup method, including copy pasting.

I use Syncthing to backup WA and Signal

But isn't it quite useless to backup WA when it's all encrypted and you can't backup the key?

The backup key is shown the first time you enable encryption.

Would you happen to have good resources detailing the process?

Pretty much what I summarized back in 2019: https://scarpino.dev/posts/automated-phone-backup-with-synct...

Nowayadays Syncthing is no more maintained due to some PlayStore drama, but Syncthing-Fork is a good replacement.

I'll start from there, thanks!

Thank you for this. Just adding this here:

There seems to be an issue with recent Android apis that make file access painfully slow that it wasn't able to sync my data in 1 full day. Enabling the "Case Sensitive FS" option on the folder helped a lot.

https://github.com/Catfriend1/syncthing-android/issues/1088#...

I guess they've changed this in the last 2 years or so because last time I checked they kept your key hostage and only allowed transferring all data, including the key, to a new phone.

I'm using this method since 2020 or even before. I've never ever enabled the backup on GDrive.

Is your phone rooted?

No, it isn't.

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