What happens when WhatsApp from an old phone is connected again?
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30-04-2021 - |
Question
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?
Solution
If you have a Mac, you can navigate to the following folder using terminal:
~/Library/Mobile Documents/
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
):
~/Library/Mobile Documents/12HJ1123DHJ~net~whatsapp~WhatsApp/Accounts/<PhoneNumber>/backup
Your chat backup and history is stored in this folder. (Hidden files, can be seen with ls -al
)
-rw-r--r--@ 1 pse staff 177 Jun 2 17:20 .BackedUpKeyValue.sqlite.enc.icloud
-rw-r--r--@ 1 pse staff 159 Jun 2 17:21 .Backup.plist.icloud
-rw-r--r--@ 1 pse staff 174 Jun 2 17:20 .ChatStorage.sqlite.enc.icloud
-rw-r--r--@ 1 pse staff 165 Jun 2 17:20 .Document.tar.aux.icloud
-rw-r--r--@ 1 pse staff 162 Jun 2 17:20 .Document.tar.icloud
-rw-r--r--@ 1 pse staff 158 Jun 2 17:21 .GIFs.tar.icloud
-rw-r--r--@ 1 pse staff 161 Jun 2 17:21 .Media.tar.aux.icloud
-rw-r--r--@ 1 pse staff 159 Jun 2 17:21 .Media.tar.icloud
-rw-r--r--@ 1 pse staff 161 Jun 2 17:20 .Media_1.tar.icloud
-rw-r--r--@ 1 pse staff 168 Jun 2 17:20 .Ranking.sqlite.enc.icloud
-rw-r--r--@ 1 pse staff 168 Jun 2 17:20 .Sticker.sqlite.enc.icloud
-rw-r--r--@ 1 pse staff 162 Jun 2 17:21 .Stickers.tar.icloud
-rw-r--r--@ 1 pse staff 167 Jun 2 17:21 .Thumbnail.tar.aux.icloud
-rw-r--r--@ 1 pse staff 163 Jun 2 17:21 .Thumbnail.tar.icloud
-rw-r--r--@ 1 pse staff 167 Jun 2 17:21 .Thumbnail_1.tar.icloud
-rw-r--r--@ 1 pse staff 172 Jun 2 17:20 .UserDefaults.plist.enc.icloud
-rw-r--r--@ 1 pse staff 161 Jun 2 17:20 .calls.log.enc.icloud
-rw-r--r--@ 1 pse staff 177 Jun 2 17:20 .current_wallpaper.jpg.enc.icloud
You can make a copy of this folder (cp -r
)
Technically these are just Apple binary property lists:
$ plutil -p .calls.log.enc.icloud
{
"NSURLFileResourceTypeKey" => "NSURLFileResourceTypeRegular"
"NSURLFileSizeKey" => 1411
"NSURLNameKey" => "calls.log.enc"
}
The quest to find the actual data still goes on :-)
OTHER TIPS
You want to use this little tool to download files from iCloud: https://github.com/farnots/iCloudDownloader
Or even better, this complete tool that is designed specifically to download WhatsApp backups from iCloud and decrypt them (along with a great explanation of what's going on here): https://blog.elcomsoft.com/2017/07/extract-and-decrypt-whatsapp-backups-from-icloud/
What's App is linked to a phone number, not to a particular device, so normally, nothing weird should happen. If you want to be absolutely sure, copy those backups you don't want to lose to some other place. (that's what I would do) ;-)