Extracting WhatsApp Messages from an iOS Backup

You might also be interested in a software called iMazing.<p>It’s a paid piece of software, not free, but it’s worth the price imo.<p>I use it mainly for transferring photos from my iPhone to my MacBook Pro M1.<p>But I know that iMazing can back up WhatsApp messages as well, among other features.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imazing.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imazing.com&#x2F;</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imazing.com&#x2F;guides&#x2F;export-and-print-whatsapp-chats-from-iphone-to-mac-pc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imazing.com&#x2F;guides&#x2F;export-and-print-whatsapp-chats-f...</a>

Thank you so much for this. We recently migrated a relative&#x27;s phone from Android to iPhone and were shocked to notice there is no way to migrate WhatsApp account history from the Android--&gt;iOS.<p>Do you have any suggestions for this?

My setup (following Schneier&#x27;s essay &#x27;data is a toxic asset&#x27;) is as follows: 1 week self-destructing messages in Signal (I don&#x27;t use WhatsApp). If its an important message I save it (can&#x27;t remember the last time that happened), if its an important picture I save it (which then gets uploaded to Nextcloud, which gets backed up to a Synology elsewhere, and it gets deleted from my smartphone but available via Nextcloud; e.g. photo as memory of our young children). There&#x27;s no data to save, no data to migrate (I also don&#x27;t use Google Drive for backups) and the only data there automagically gets removed within a week. My Nextcloud is only reachable via Wireguard. If my smartphone gets compromised (ie. stolen or lost) I&#x27;d need to revoke that keypair in Wireguard.

It&#x27;s interesting that you can get the decryption key on iOS but the only way to do it on Android is to root your device.

Back in the days you would just lose all your message history anyway with text &#x2F; AOL &#x2F; MSN &#x2F; facebook messenger &#x2F; others… so I just started accepting it as a fact of life that you can’t keep your messaging history forever.

Extracting isn&#x27;t the hard part. I have yet to figure out how to append Whatsapp message from a previous backup which I have held for 8 years.<p>The iOS backup was corrupted and I had to start over again at the time. The Whatsapp file was extracted but I never got round to it. ( Along with important pictures inside the Whatsapp)<p>To this day I still blame on it on iOS backup problem. Which is <i>still</i> a thing in 2022.<p>I wonder why Facebook hasn&#x27;t made an iOS to Android Whatsapp history transfer a priority. To most people outside of US, Whatsapp history transfer is the biggest lock in with the Smartphone ecosystem.

On a similar topic, is this possible with Signal or iMessage? I have an incomplete archive on my phone due to data loss but my iPad has a continuous record. I would love to get it synced to the phone.

last I extracted (and migrated) WA from iOS I used idevicebackup2 and a util ideviceunback to get a decrypted sqlite database. From there it&#x27;s sqlite schema discovery that is documented in multiple places, e.g. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;paracycle&#x2F;6107205" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;paracycle&#x2F;6107205</a> - the method of an decrypted backup skips the elaborate steps outlined in the article.

Lost all of my WhatsApp messages when moving from android to iPhone. This would have been nice if I still ajay that android phone.

I thought you could backup&#x2F;restore WhatsApp messages to&#x2F;from Google drive? I have seen that work between two Android phones - does that feature not exist in the WhatsApp iOS app?

Anyone know of a good way to extract information from the Notes app using Ubuntu?

Also Elcomsoft phone breaker, which also grabs iCloud backups.

This kind of hacking shouldn’t be necessary.<p>I think WhatsApp should be fined heavily for not providing the portability that the GDPR requires them to provide.<p>Yes, (on iOS) you can export your settings and each individual chat, but IMO they should have a one-click solution.<p>(I think their argument for not having to provide it is that WhatsApp messages are stored on each user’s phone, not on their servers, but IMO, they still are inside WhatsApp’s realm. Certainly, on iOS you cannot open them in any other way than to the WhatsApp app)

That escalated quickly.