How to move a whole WhatsApp chat — with its photos and voice notes

Most people discover the problem the same way. They try to keep a conversation — a parent, a partner, a group of friends from university — and they end up with a text file that starts somewhere in the middle and says <Media omitted> a few thousand times.

A chat is not only its words. It is the photo someone sent from a hospital corridor, the voice note in a voice that no longer calls, the document with the flight numbers. Moving a conversation properly means moving all of it.

There are exactly three routes, and they differ in what survives the trip.

1. The export file: quick, partial, works everywhere

Inside WhatsApp, Chat → More → Export chat produces a .txt file, optionally zipped together with media.

It is the fastest route and the only one that works from an iPhone. It is also the most lossy:

• With media attached, WhatsApp includes only the most recent 10,000 messages.
• Without media, the limit is 40,000 messages.
• Even inside the limit, larger videos and some documents are dropped.
• Reactions, replies and edits are flattened into plain lines of text.

For a chat that is a few months old, this is fine. For a five-year conversation it removes the beginning — which is usually the part you wanted.

Open the ZIP or TXT directly in WaChat Web and the messages and their media are matched back together, with real bubbles, dates and playable voice notes. Nothing is uploaded: the file is read in the browser.

2. The encrypted backup plus your 64-digit key: complete

WhatsApp keeps its own local backup on Android at:

Android/media/com.whatsapp/WhatsApp/Databases/msgstore.db.crypt15

That file holds every message in every chat, with no 10,000 or 40,000 cap. It is encrypted with a key that only you hold — the 64-digit key from Settings → Chats → Chat backup → End-to-end encrypted backup.

Give WaChat that file and that key and you get the whole history at once. The decryption happens on your device, in a background worker in the browser or inside the Android app. The key is never sent anywhere and never written to a log.

Media is a separate step, because the backup contains messages and thumbnails rather than the original files. Point WaChat at the WhatsApp/Media folder on your phone (or copy it to your computer first) and every photo, video, sticker and voice note is attached back to the message it belongs to.

3. The Android app: complete, and it keeps itself up to date

If you use Android, the app does the same decryption where the backup already lives, saves the result to the hidden app folder of your own Google Drive, and repeats it every night after WhatsApp writes its backup.

Then any browser you sign into shows the same chats, already up to date. This is the only route that keeps working without you remembering to do anything.

Which one should you use?

• You only need one conversation, and it is not enormous — export it and open the file. One minute, no key, no app.
• You want everything, once — use the encrypted backup with your key. It is the complete picture.
• You want everything, permanently — install the app and let it sync. Read it anywhere afterwards.

All three land in the same viewer, so you can start with the fast route and upgrade later without losing what you already imported.

A note on where your messages go

None of these routes send your messages to us. The export file and the encrypted backup are opened on your device. The Drive copy goes to your own Drive, in the hidden app folder that only WaChat can see — and that you can delete from Drive settings at any time, which removes it everywhere.

That is the whole point. A conversation you want to keep for twenty years should not depend on trusting a company you have never met.