2

My phone has suffered physical damage and it will no longer turn on. I have given it to a phone repair shop in the hope that the data is still alive in there and that it can be extracted using external means. Assuming I can get a copy of the internal storage of that phone into a thumb drive, one of the things I would like to recover from it is the WhatsApp chat history. The standard procedure, however, requires a working Android system on the old phone to work, and this might be a little too much of a stretch given the damage.

Is there a way to recover the chat history given these circumstances? Or is it lost to history due to WhatsApp's encryption mechanisms?

Community
  • 1
E.P.
  • 133
  • 1
  • 1
  • 6
  • If you made a backup previously, it's a maybe, and that's still a big maybe. Without one, the chances are low. – Ethan Z Nov 19 '15 at 02:52

1 Answers1

2

You can, if you can save everything in the /data/data/com.whatsapp folder. Your logs will be in /data/data/com.whatsapp/databases but they are encrypted as you mentioned and encryption key is in /data/data/com.whatsapp/files/key. Proper transfer of these files will mean a successful operation. Once you start Whatsapp on another phone with the /data folder from your broken phone and start Whatsapp, it will prompt you to activate Whatsapp on this phone with a text like "This account wasn't activated on this phone, please activate" and once you do, it'll be successfully done.

SarpSTA
  • 2,682
  • 5
  • 19
  • 36
  • 1
    Thanks for this. I'm still waiting for the workshop to come back and say whether they recovered the data; if they did I'll give this a shot. – E.P. Nov 19 '15 at 11:08
  • 1
    I was unable to recover the data so I don't know for sure that this works, but it sounds about right so I'm accepting this. – E.P. Nov 29 '15 at 11:23