3 min read
Why WhatsApp's export stops at 40,000 messages
The export limit is real, documented, and easy to hit. Here is where the numbers come from, how to tell if your export was truncated, and what to do instead.
By WaChat
If you have exported a long chat and found that it begins abruptly in the middle of a sentence from 2022, nothing went wrong. That is the feature working as designed.
The two numbers
WhatsApp's "Export chat" has two caps, and which one applies depends on the choice you make in the dialog:
| Export option | Messages included |
|---|---|
| Attach media | the most recent 10,000 |
| Without media | the most recent 40,000 |
The word that matters is recent. The export is taken from the end of the conversation backwards. When it runs out of budget it simply stops, with no warning, no marker, and no mention in the file that anything is missing.
Why the limit exists
Export was built for sharing a chat, not for archiving one — a receipt you send to someone, an argument you forward to a friend, evidence you hand to a lawyer. It runs on your phone, holds the result in memory, and passes it to the share sheet. A five-year group chat with media would be several gigabytes; phones would run out of memory and share targets would refuse the file.
So the cap is a practical one. It is just badly matched to the way people actually use it.
How to tell whether yours was cut
Open the .txt file and look at the first line. If your conversation started in 2019 and the first line is dated last spring, the export is truncated. Two more signs:
- The file is missing the
Messages and calls are end-to-end encryptedline that WhatsApp writes at the very beginning of a chat. - The line count is suspiciously close to a round 10,000 or 40,000.
You can also count: 40,000 messages is roughly 22 messages a day for five years. Active group chats pass it in a year.
<Media omitted> is a second, separate loss
Even inside the limit, the export drops content:
- Choosing "without media" replaces every photo, video, sticker, voice note and document with
<Media omitted>. - Choosing "attach media" keeps files but pulls the cap down to 10,000 messages, and still skips larger videos on some devices.
- View-once messages, deleted messages and reactions do not survive either way.
So the export forces a trade: the whole conversation as bare text, or a third of it with pictures.
What to do instead
WhatsApp's own encrypted backup has no such cap. The file msgstore.db.crypt15 on your phone contains every message in every chat, because it was built for restoring a device rather than for sharing.
You already hold the key to it: the 64-digit code from Settings → Chats → Chat backup → End-to-end encrypted backup. With that file and that key, WaChat decrypts the backup on your own device and reads the complete history — we have tested a 336,000-message chat with media, which is more than eight times what the export would have given you.
Add your WhatsApp/Media folder and the photos and voice notes come back attached to the right messages.
The short version
The export limit is 10,000 messages with media and 40,000 without, counted from the most recent message backwards, with no warning when it truncates. If your conversation is longer than that — and if it is more than a couple of years old, it probably is — export the backup instead of exporting the chat.