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Comment by dwedge | Hacker News Reader

This was even more annoying when they started including whatsapp backups in your quota and sent a load of people over quota. And as far as I know there's no alternative for whatsapp backups apart from plugging in a USB cable and hoping Whatsapp don't change the method between now and when you need to restore it

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It is possible to back up the WhatsApp folder if using Android, with the likes of total commander or any other file browser.

It can then be decrypted with a simple access to the _sim card_, i.e. a way to receive a message, meaning that anything backed up to Google drive should not considered safe from a dedicated state actor (even if the other party did it). It is quite easy to demonstrate with a new phone or an emulator.

I have doubts on how much the US gov needs to break the Whisper protocol when they have such easy to get side attacks.

I was under the impression that to backup the encrypted whatsapp you need to enable your own encryption key, which presumably makes it more secure but of course that's trusting Meta's implementation

The Whatsapp's restore process if you're not on Google Drive is unreliable too. I keep a separate backup but also have to keep the Google Drive backup on because it's too risky now I've seen it fail to restore and was only able to rescue it using the Google Drive backup I had also. If it just had my backup I'd have lost the lot.

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