Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from December, 2015

WhatsApp: How to get out of Google Drive backup during restore

Let's say you have accidentally enabled Google Drive backup on your WhatsApp. Now when you want to restore it to a new phone, you find that you have to download 500MB worth of data and wait for an insane amount of time because you don't have fast broadband. What do you do? I found myself in this situation recently and cracked my head a bit trying to solve it. Thought I'd log this down and save someone else in the same situation a little time. Firstly, whether or not Google Drive backup is enabled, a local backup file is always created in the SD-card under /WhatsApp/Databases/msgstore.db.crypt8 . The full path is typically /storage/emulated/0/WhatsApp/Databases/msgstore.db.crypt8 . You have to copy msgstore.db.crypt8 to the the same path on the new smartphone (create the necessary subfolders along the way) before WhatsApp is installed. The next step delinks WhatsApp from Google Drive so that when you install and run it on the new smartphone, it will not insist on rest