Save your WhatsApp chats before you change, wipe or clear your iPhone

Two jobs that get mixed up

When people say they want to “save their WhatsApp” before a phone change, they usually mean one or both of these:

• Move it: carry on using WhatsApp on the new phone with your history there. WhatsApp handles this itself.
• Keep it: have a copy of the conversations, photos and voice notes that you can open on a computer in ten years without any phone, account or app. WhatsApp does not do this.

Do both. A move can fail half way, an account can be lost, and a chat you delete next year is gone from the new phone too. A copy on your Mac does not care about any of that.

The checklist

1. Keep the old phone working until the end. Do not wipe, reset or trade it in until every step below is done and checked.
2. Make sure the media you care about is downloaded. Scroll through important chats and tap any photos or voice notes that were never downloaded. Anything not on the phone cannot be saved from it.
3. Keep a copy on your Mac. Export your chats, with media, to files you own. The next section shows how.
4. Open the export and check it. Pick a few important chats and confirm the messages and photos are there.
5. Put a second copy somewhere else. Time Machine, an external drive, or a cloud folder you already trust.
6. Then move WhatsApp to the new phone with WhatsApp's own transfer, following its current instructions for iPhone or Android.
7. Only now wipe the old phone, and sign out of your Apple Account on it before handing it on.

Keeping a copy with Chatcove

Chatcove makes an encrypted backup of the iPhone on your Mac, which is where iOS includes WhatsApp's data, and turns it into files you can read.

1. Check the Mac has free space at least equal to what the iPhone is using; the backup includes the camera roll and can be tens of gigabytes.
2. Connect the iPhone with a cable, unlock it, and open Chatcove. Enter your passcode on the phone once when asked.
3. When the backup finishes, read through your chats in the app. This is free, so you can confirm everything is there before paying for anything.
4. Export all chats as HTML with media for reading later, and add PDF for anything you might print, or CSV for a spreadsheet.

Exporting everything is $9, once, for up to 2 Macs. It all runs on your Mac: no account, nothing uploaded, and it works with the network off.

If you are switching to Android

Moving WhatsApp from an iPhone to Android has more conditions than iPhone to iPhone, and it is the move most likely to go wrong. That makes the copy on your Mac more important, not less. If WhatsApp's own route does not suit you, transfer tools such as Dr.Fone and iCareFone specialise in it. Chatcove does not transfer to phones.

If you just need the space back

WhatsApp media is often the largest thing on an iPhone. To free it without losing it:

1. Export the chats with media to your Mac and check the export opens.
2. Keep a second copy of the export.
3. In WhatsApp, go to Settings, Storage and Data, Manage Storage, and clear the large files or chats you no longer need on the phone.

Once media is cleared from the phone, the export is your copy of it. If WhatsApp's iCloud backup is also what is filling your storage, see backing up WhatsApp without iCloud.

If the old phone is already gone

Then what you can recover depends on what backups exist. A WhatsApp iCloud backup can be restored onto a new iPhone with the same number. An older encrypted iPhone backup on a Mac may still hold the history up to the day it was made. Without either, the chats live only on the phones of the people you talked to.

Common questions