Google drive backup restore fails and Customer support sucks !

[shazzzzzzzz]

HI all,

My backup restore failed when i reinstalled whatsapp and please go through this mail chain to understand how amazing their customer support is

Google drive Whatsapp backup restore failed
Inbox

shazzzzzzzz
Jan 6 (6 days ago)

to support
Hi,

I have been using whatsapp from past four years. My number +xxxxxxxxxxxx. I did factory reset on my phone. Here is the problem i am facing when i reinstalled whatsapp

1 - It detects my drive backup and tries to restore the messages. upon reaching 100% on progress bar, i see a pop up saying "sorry we were unable to restore any of your message history backups". I tried multiple times, but same result.

2 - I had even made a local backup to my laptop before i reset my phone. Even though i copied all the contents on to my phone, whatsapp always tries to restore from drive and fails miserably.

3 - So i deleted the google drive backup and tried again hoping whatsapp might restore data from local backup.Even though it detects the local backup and tries to restore it, again i get the same error.

this is some serious bug.

Its very much important that i get all my conversations back as i hold them dear to my heart. Please let me know what to do.

regards,
shazzzzzzzz

WhatsApp Support
Jan 6 (6 days ago)

to me
##- WhatsApp Support -##

Hi,

Thanks for contacting WhatsApp.

Please note that we focus our attention on fixing bugs, which may result in a delayed response to other inquiries. We value your questions and will work diligently to get back to you as quickly as possible.

In the meantime, please look at our FAQ to see if your question is answered there.

FAQ page:

If you have not done so, please provide the following:
1) Your phone number in this format: + Country Code Phone Number
2) Your device model

Below are the answers to some commonly asked questions:

What are WhatsApp's subscription fees?


Why can't I connect to WhatsApp?


Can I recover deleted messages?

If you submitted a suggestion, thank you very much for sharing your feedback. Please note that we cannot comment specifically about plans and developments, but we value your feedback and have taken note of your suggestion.
To add any updates to your request, please respond to this email. We are here to help!

Thanks!

request #54008566219164

WhatsApp Support
11:25 AM (13 hours ago)

to me
##- WhatsApp Support -##

Hi,

We apologize that we have not gotten back to you yet. Please make sure to visit our FAQ page if you have not already:
xxxxxxxxxxxx

One commonly asked question is about supported devices. You can find the answer to that question here:
xxxxxxxxxxxx

If you are still experiencing the issue you wrote in about, and the above information does not help, please reply to this email. If we do not hear from you soon, we will consider your issue to be resolved and we will close your request in our system.

If you have not done so already, please include the below in your reply:

Which mobile device you use (the more detail the better)
Which OS your device runs
Your phone number in full international format (+ Country code Area code Phone number)
See this article for details: xxxxxxxxxxxx
WhatsApp version (go into WhatsApp > Settings > About to retrieve this info)
We will try our best to get back to you shortly!

request #54008566219164

shazzzzzzzz
11:47 AM (13 hours ago)

to WhatsApp
I have gone through all your FAQs, tried everything and came knocking at your doorstep only when i couldn't find the solution. Both google drive and local backup restore fails with the same message - "sorry we were unable to restore any of your message history backups".

Details which you asked for

1 - Nexus 4
2 - Android Version 5.1.1
3 - phone number +xxxxxxxxxxxx
4 - My whatsapp is up to date .

More info - I have conversation from 3 years, the backup file size is around 110MB. Does your app has any limitation as to how much of a content it can restore?

And I am again mentioning the things i tried for your clarity
1 - Whatsapp detects my drive backup and tries to restore the messages. upon reaching 100% on progress bar, i see a pop up saying "sorry we were unable to restore any of your message history backups". I tried multiple times, but same result.

2 - I had even made a local backup to my laptop before i reset my phone. Even though i copied all the contents on to my phone, whatsapp always tries to restore from drive and fails miserably.

3 - So i deleted the google drive backup and tried again hoping whatsapp might restore data from local backup. Even though it detects the local backup and tries to restore it, again i get the same error.

regards,
shazzzzzzzz

WhatsApp Support
10:22 PM (2 hours ago)

to me
##- WhatsApp Support -##

Hi,

Thanks for your message.

WhatsApp automatically creates local backups every day at 2 AM and stores them in the WhatsApp folder of your Android phone. This folder is located in your device's internal memory or external SD card. Depending on your settings, WhatsApp could also make a backup in Google Drive. To restore using the most recent backup file, simply uninstall and reinstall the app. When asked if you wish to restore your messages, tap on [Restore] to restore your messages. If you wish to skip restoring from a Google Drive backup, simply select [Skip] when prompted to restore from Google Drive.

IMPORTANT:

You may only restore your local backup by using the same mobile telephone number as stored in your previous backup. If you are trying to restore from Google Drive, please make sure you are using the same mobile telephone number and Google account used to create the backup.
Please make sure your WhatsApp backup files are stored in WhatsApp/Databases folder. The location of WhatsApp folder is determined by your device. It is normally located in your “Internal Storage”, or if you have an older device it may be located in your “SD card”. Please note, when changing to a newer handset, you may have to move the folder from your SD card to your internal storage.
We are unable to merge your backup files, you may only restore from one file at a time.
Backup files are only readable by restoring them in WhatsApp.
If your device is plugged into your computer at night, low on storage space or is set to sleep with no background data; WhatsApp will not be able to backup your chat history.
If your restoration is successful but you are missing some chats, it is possible that your database backup was corrupted and these are the only messages we can restore for you.
If you cannot uninstall WhatsApp on your device, you may go into your phone's [Settings] > [Applications] > [WhatsApp] > [Clear Data]. Once you open WhatsApp again, it will prompt you to set up as if it were a fresh install.
Please note, if you are unable to restore your chats, we can not restore your chats, contacts, call history, or multimedia files for you.

For more information regarding chat restoration, please see our FAQ article: xxxxxxxxxxxx

If you have any other questions or concerns, please feel free to contact us. We would be happy to help!

shazzzzzzzz
12:50 AM (3 minutes ago)

to WhatsApp
Hi,

Me being an IT guy, i know what i am doing. I went through all your FAQs before coming to you. The simple fact is that , your application failed to restore the backup even with all the right procedure being followed by the user. Its a bug which needs to be fixed.

And i also know you cant restore my chats, thanks for that!

Being a programmer myself, i would suggest you to ACCEPT that there is a bug(instead of replying me with FAQs every time) and whenever your application displays the error message saying "sorry we were unable to restore any of your message history backups" , make sure you ask the user to send error logs for your analysis at least.

Thanks for nothing!

Bye!

 

[Koustubh Ramakrishnan]

Faced the same issue switching phones! Drive backup seemed to take forever I thought I'll make do with local backup.
The solution is to remove your google accounts from Settings. Clear Whatsapp data and then reinstall. That forces Whatsapp to look for local backups. Hope I helped

 

[pinga123]

i have the same problem as you, even i found a old backup (which i have used it to restore months ago) it is still failed.
it pause at 65% for long, then goes to 90% then show the same error as you.

do you find any solution so far?

 

[DennyD123]

Hello guys,
first I am new in the forum. I registered only because I have the same issue like you guys. I searched through the whole world wide web.

Let me explain, so I think we have all the same problem. We try to restore a backup and it stops at 90%+ then WhatsApp say „Restore failed.."

I think our problem is that our backups are very big, to big? My Database is 39,15MB big, sounds small but it includes messages since 2013. About 250.000 messages.

I tried since yesterday to restore my backup. The funny thing is, before i uninstall WhatsApp i did a local backup and a cloud backup. I think the backups are all correct, not incorrect.

What can we do?

I asked in two WhatsApp Groups how to solve the problem.

First when you did a backup with a AppManger like Titanium Backup or something else. Just install the WhatsApp apk and restore only the data. So you have your chats back. You need only to verificat.

But I think we all didn't have the option and we need to find a our way. I write a email to WhatsApp, but after I read the text from shazzz.. I think they didn't won't help us and they read in my log that I have root.

But anyone have a idea how to solve it.. I have many backups from the last days, i want only too install one backup..

Sorry for my grammar, I hope you understand me.

 

[1994vicksa]

any one got the solution for this problem ???
plz help me out facing same problem..

 

[1994vicksa]

bro did u get the soluton ?

 

[ketu1122]

yes man...sharing the same opinion; i've about 1GB of Gdrive backup and still not able to restore
Whatsapp customer service is really hopeless; not giving any solution since last couple of weeks...
please is anyone knows how to restore Gdrive whatsapp backup on new phone; help..

 

[zemiri]

------------- POSSIBLE SOLUTION!!!! -------------
Hey guys!
About an hour ago I had the same problem as you did. I don't know if any of you has been able to solve it, but here's what I did:
Surprise - restoring the backup from Google Drive didn't work, so I connected my phone (Honor 7, Android 6.0) to my pc, went to /WhatsApp/Databases/ and copied the msgstore.db.crypt10 file to my pc. After several unsuccessful attempts to reinstall WA and restore the backup, I decided to backup WA again (saving empty/no chats), but this time only locally and I disabled the Google Drive backup. After restarting the phone and connecting it to my pc, I saw that a new file had been saved in the same folder on my phone, but this time it was .crypt9. I copied the mgsgstore.db.crypt10 file previously saved on my pc 3 times into the Databases folder, changing the extensions to crypt10, 9 and 8 (I remember it used to be stored as 8 before the Android update - might be totally useless but I wanted to try it nevertheless), overwriting existing files with the same name. I also copied the same 3 files into the folder with the same name on the SD card. Useless or not, IT WORKED!!!

I apologize for my lack of precise knowledge and/or experience, because I can't really explain which file had to be overridden to make the difference, but it worked. And I guess that's what counts.

Anyway, sorry for the long post (no potato unfortunately), but it might be worth a try!

 

[rahulvj1]

hey guys.. i am also facing this same issue. I tried exactly what u guys did. still no hope. I could see that it worked for a person by ' I also copied the same 3 files into the folder with the same name on the SD card'. could u pls specify the weather u did this after opening whatsapp or before.

i ll give brief scenario of my case. I have used whatsapp in my old phone for almost 3 yrs. Now i have changed my phone and number. I did conversion of number from my old phone itself. And took backup via google drive. that didnt work. so i deleted the backup in google drive. Then i tried copying the database folder from my old phone to new phone. All this is done after installing whatsapp in new phone but before opening the application. It said that it found local backup and asked to restore, i did that. didnt work. Now, i may not be right but what my understanding is that my old phone had older version of whatsapp so the files in database folder are crypted as .crypt8. But i could see the in latest whatsapp version its .crypt12. So i think that the latest version cannot decrypt the old version's database.

What i a planning to do is update the whatsapp in old phone and see if takes local backup to .crypt12 and then try copying that to new phone and see if it works.

 

[Mayank Gupta6]

Ty to reboot your phone while performing backup, hope it would help

 

[zillah2004]

I am having the same issue whatsup on my SGS3 takes hours (nearly 6 hours) to do a backup to google drive and I have been waiting but not yet finished,,,I don't should I wait longer ? or it is a bug in the app ?

 

[Tibi Stibi]

what worked for me was the following: (i was migrating from one phone to an other(same brand and version!))i copied the latest file from drive/Whatsapp/databases and put it on my sd card.then a renamed it to msgstore.db.crypt12 and put it in Whatsapp/databases on my sd card and on my phone.i also copied the files as msgstore.db.crypt13 msgstore.db.crypt11 msgstore.db.crypt10 msgstore.db.crypt9 and msgstore.db.crypt8 just to give whatsapp all the options it wants.i removed the google drive backup which was weeks old and could not be used.i started whatsapp and it immediately found the backup and started to restore the messages. while the backup was only 13mb large i think the images and video's will not be in there but all my messages are. hope this will work for you all.whatsapp version is: 2.16.225

 

[Neuvilla]

I've encountered the same problem. Unfortunately though, my old phone was pretty much destroyed on a rainy hike in the mountains and so I can't get access to the whatsapp folder. I'm relying on the google drive backup but it just doesn't seem to work. I've tried installing an old version of whatsapp on my new phone, but that also didn't work. There's so much information on my old messages and I'm really annoyed that it might be gone after trusting that it was all being safely backed up.

Has anyone got any other ideas? My old phone occasionally flickers into life, so I might try and see if I can grab the local backup when this happens. But other than hoping that'll work, any other suggestions that might work?

 

[NainaS]

Hello all..
I am also facing the same issue but i didn't received any error message popup. It just stuck after showing 100% progress.

 

[Yasmay]

Sorry wrong thread

 

[coolfire77]

what worked for me was the following: (i was migrating from one phone to an other(same brand and version!))i copied the latest file from drive/Whatsapp/databases and put it on my sd card.then a renamed it to msgstore.db.crypt12 and put it in Whatsapp/databases on my sd card and on my phone.i also copied the files as msgstore.db.crypt13 msgstore.db.crypt11 msgstore.db.crypt10 msgstore.db.crypt9 and msgstore.db.crypt8 just to give whatsapp all the options it wants.i removed the google drive backup which was weeks old and could not be used.i started whatsapp and it immediately found the backup and started to restore the messages. while the backup was only 13mb large i think the images and video's will not be in there but all my messages are. hope this will work for you all.whatsapp version is: 2.16.225

You literally saved my life!

Was searching like crazy for a solution to this similar problem, as I had accidentally deleted my gdrive backup before I sent my s8 plus for warranty repair.

Nit sure why renaming the same backup files to 8, 9, 10, 11 & 12 works, but I feel that whatsapp should update their faq, seriously.

Thnakd a million again!

 

[Help_89]

You literally saved my life!

Was searching like crazy for a solution to this similar problem, as I had accidentally deleted my gdrive backup before I sent my s8 plus for warranty repair.

Nit sure why renaming the same backup files to 8, 9, 10, 11 & 12 works, but I feel that whatsapp should update their faq, seriously.

Thnakd a million again!

I am also now facing the same issue . [email removed by Mod for privacy]. Appreciate your help

 

[Mech boy_18]

whatsapp find the backup but i can'trestore it. Check your phone's internet connection and tap Retry to restore. whenever i tap on restore it loads couple seconds and then shows the same error message

 

[Edude58]

Hi guys
I succeeded restoring from local old backup. My trick was deleting my google account from settings/cloud.and.accounts AFTER reinstalling whatsapp (google play needs account) and BEFORE opening whatsapp. During the setup dialog, the google backup was not found without account and my desired local backup Phone/WhatsApp/Databases/msgstore.db.crypt12 was.
Before opening whatsapp, of course, my desired backup was copied from the dated version and renamed.
I was glad to be able to export some chats that I was missing. After that I reverted to my recent database before new messages were received.

Greets and good luck.