I‘ve got an old iPhone in my closet, which I used until one year ago, when I bought a new one.
On the old iPhone, I had WhatsApp with iCloud Backup enabled. However I did not include the videos in the backup.
When I got the new one, I set it up via iCloud backup, and continued my online life and history.
Now I do miss these videos. Now I‘m wondering what happens when I start my old phone which has these videos locally, and open WhatsApp. What will happen? What will happen to the backup? What will happen to the chat history? Is there a way I could like download the messages on my old phone (and be current) while still having the videos, then recreate the backup, turn it off and then having the videos on the new device, when restored from backup?
Best Answer
If you have a Mac, you can navigate to the following folder using terminal:
List all hidden files (from the terminal) to see a folder which looks like:
12HJ1123DHJ~net~whatsapp~WhatsApp
, i.e. random alpha-numeric sequence ending withnet~whatsapp~WhatsApp
.cd
into this folder.Next, navigate into
Accounts/<PhoneNumber>/backup
from this folder.Finally you'll be in a folder whose path which looks like this (check with
pwd
):Your chat backup and history is stored in this folder. (Hidden files, can be seen with
ls -al
)You can make a copy of this folder (
cp -r
)Technically these are just Apple binary property lists:
The quest to find the actual data still goes on :-)