People want a chat on paper for two very different reasons. Either it is a keepsake — a year of messages with someone, bound and put on a shelf — or it is a record, something that needs to exist outside an app on a phone that could be lost tomorrow.
\nBoth end at the same place: a PDF. Getting there is more fiddly than it should be, and the route you pick decides whether the photos come with it.
\nThis works on any phone and costs nothing.
\n.txt to a computer.What you get is honest but plain: a wall of monospaced lines, each starting with a date, a time and a name. No bubbles, no distinction between you and them, and every photo replaced by <Media omitted>. On top of that, the export includes only the most recent 40,000 messages without media, or 10,000 with — silently, with nothing in the file to say it was cut.
For a short conversation this is completely fine and you should stop here. For a long one it produces a document that is hard to read and quietly incomplete.
\nThe alternative is to import the chat into a reader that lays it out properly and print from there. In WaChat Web that is Print or export in the chat menu, or Ctrl + P.
The dialog offers a set of formats, and they are not interchangeable:
\n| Format | Best for | Note |
|---|---|---|
| printing, sharing, archiving | photos embedded; free without media | |
| HTML (single file) | reading on a computer, one self-contained file | photos embedded |
| Text (WhatsApp format) | feeding into another tool | plain, no media |
| ZIP (everything) | a complete copy | includes every media file, audio included |
| CSV / JSON | analysis, spreadsheets, scripts | structured data, not for reading |
Alongside the format you can set:
\nThe dialog estimates the page count before you commit, which is the number that decides whether you are printing a booklet or a shelf.
\nTo be clear about what costs money: TXT and PDF without media are free. PDF with media, HTML, CSV and JSON are part of Plus. If you only need the text of a conversation as a PDF, the free tier does that, for a complete chat, without a message cap.
\nA PDF is paper. It holds text and images and nothing else.
\nThat means voice notes cannot be printed. In a printed chat they appear as what they are — an entry showing a voice message and its place in the conversation — but the audio itself is not in the document. Videos are the same.
\nIf the recordings are the part you actually care about, export the ZIP as well and keep it alongside the PDF. The ZIP contains every media file, audio included. Print the PDF for the shelf; keep the ZIP for the things that need to be heard.
\nIf the goal is something bound rather than a file, a few practical things make the difference between a nice object and 900 pages of unreadable margin.
\nSplit by year. Use the date range and export one PDF per year. A multi-year chat as a single volume is unbindable and unpleasant to read. One year per volume also gives each book a natural cover.
\nCheck the page estimate before you export. A busy group chat produces far more pages than people expect. If a year comes out at several hundred pages, split by half-year instead.
\nDecide on media before you print. Photos make the book, but they also multiply the page count and the printing cost. A reasonable middle path is one volume with everything for the year that matters most, and text-only volumes for the rest.
\nInclude the header and page numbers. They cost nothing and they turn a stack of pages into something you can navigate.
\nPrint at the size you will actually read. Photo-book services and normal print shops both accept a PDF. A5 suits a keepsake; A4 suits a reference document. Leave a wider inside margin than feels necessary — binding eats it.
\nProof one volume first. Print a single year, look at it, then order the rest. Something is always slightly off on the first attempt.
\nThere is also a ready-made version of this idea: the yearbook under Memories, which builds a PDF from a year of a conversation as a designed book rather than a transcript. It is part of Plus, and it is a different thing from the print dialog — a highlights book rather than a complete record. For a complete record, use the print dialog.
\n| You want | Do this |
|---|---|
| A short chat as a PDF, free, right now | Export without media, open the .txt, print to PDF |
| A complete chat as a readable PDF | Import it, then Print or export → PDF |
| The photos in the document | PDF with media |
| The voice notes kept too | Add the ZIP export alongside |
| A bound book | One PDF per year, with media, header and page numbers |
A lot of people print conversations for a dispute — a landlord, an employer, a contract. Two honest points.
\nFirst, we make no claim about whether any output is admissible anywhere. That depends on the jurisdiction and the case, and it is a question for a lawyer, not for a file format.
\nSecond, whatever you produce, produce it completely. A truncated export that starts halfway through the relevant month is worse than useless. If the conversation matters enough to print, it matters enough to check that the beginning is actually in it — which, for anything longer than the export caps, means importing the backup rather than the export.
\nFor a short conversation, exporting without media and printing to PDF is free and takes five minutes. For a long one, or one where the photos matter, import the chat first and print from there — with a date range, a header and page numbers, split into volumes if you are having it bound. Keep a ZIP alongside for anything that has to be heard rather than read.
\nMost 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.
\nThere are exactly three routes, and they differ in what survives the trip.
\nInside 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:
\nFor 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.
\nOpen 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.
\nWhatsApp keeps its own local backup on Android at:
\nAndroid/media/com.whatsapp/WhatsApp/Databases/msgstore.db.crypt15\nThat 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.
\nGive 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.
\nMedia 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.
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.
\nThen 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.
\nAll three land in the same viewer, so you can start with the fast route and upgrade later without losing what you already imported.
\nNone 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.
\nThat is the whole point. A conversation you want to keep for twenty years should not depend on trusting a company you have never met.
\n", "date_published": "2026-09-02T00:00:00.000Z", "date_modified": "2026-09-02T00:00:00.000Z", "authors": [ { "name": "WaChat" } ], "tags": [ "export", "backup", "media" ], "language": "en" }, { "id": "https://wachatplus.com/en/blog/why-whatsapp-export-stops-at-40000", "url": "https://wachatplus.com/en/blog/why-whatsapp-export-stops-at-40000", "title": "Why WhatsApp's export stops at 40,000 messages", "summary": "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.", "content_html": "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.
\nWhatsApp's "Export chat" has two caps, and which one applies depends on the choice you make in the dialog:
\n| 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.
\nExport 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.
\nSo the cap is a practical one. It is just badly matched to the way people actually use it.
\nOpen 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:
Messages and calls are end-to-end encrypted line that WhatsApp writes at the very beginning of a chat.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 lossEven inside the limit, the export drops content:
\n<Media omitted>.So the export forces a trade: the whole conversation as bare text, or a third of it with pictures.
\nWhatsApp'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.
\nAdd your WhatsApp/Media folder and the photos and voice notes come back attached to the right messages.
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.
\n", "date_published": "2026-08-26T00:00:00.000Z", "date_modified": "2026-08-26T00:00:00.000Z", "authors": [ { "name": "WaChat" } ], "tags": [ "export", "limits", "backup" ], "language": "en" }, { "id": "https://wachatplus.com/en/blog/move-whatsapp-history-to-a-new-phone", "url": "https://wachatplus.com/en/blog/move-whatsapp-history-to-a-new-phone", "title": "Moving WhatsApp history to a new phone", "summary": "Android to Android, iPhone to iPhone, and both cross-platform routes. What each transfer moves, what it leaves behind, and what to do before you switch.", "content_html": "Changing phones is the moment most WhatsApp history is lost. Not dramatically — nobody deletes anything. It just quietly does not arrive on the new phone, and by the time you notice, the old one has been traded in.
\nThe transfers themselves work well. What catches people is the setup requirements, which are stricter than they look, and the fact that a cross-platform move changes what archiving options you have afterwards.
\nSame phone number. WhatsApp restores a backup only onto an account with the number the backup was made under. Changing number and phone at once is a different, harder problem.
\nFresh setup, for cross-platform moves. Moving between Android and iPhone happens during the new phone's initial setup. If you have already finished setup and used the phone, you have to factory reset it to get the option back. Same-platform restores are more forgiving — they happen when you install WhatsApp and sign in — but even those must be done before you dismiss the restore prompt, because it does not come back later.
\nDo everything before wiping the old phone. Once it is reset or traded in, the local backup goes with it, and so does any media the cloud backup did not include.
\nOne shot. These transfers are not incremental. You do not get to run them again to pick up what was missed.
\nThe easiest case.
\nIf you use end-to-end encrypted backup, you will need your 64-digit key or your password at this point. Have it ready before you start — this is a common place to get stuck.
\nMedia follows the backup, but only what the backup contains. If Include videos was off in WhatsApp's backup settings, videos will not come across.
\nSame shape, different provider.
\nThe usual failure is iCloud storage, not WhatsApp. If the backup did not run, check the space first.
\nThis one uses Apple's Move to iOS app and has to happen during iPhone setup.
\nThe mirror image, and it usually wants a cable.
\nSome Android manufacturers ship their own switching app for this. The flow is the same.
\nCross-platform transfers move your conversations and the media attached to them. They do not move everything, and the exact list changes between app versions — call history is one of the things that has historically not carried across.
\nThe reliable advice here is not to trust an article, including this one: the transfer screen lists what it will move before you confirm. Read it. If something you care about is not on that list, deal with it separately, before you start.
\nThe one thing that is certain in every direction: the transfer moves your history to the new phone and does not leave a usable archive behind for you.
\nEverything above is about getting your chats to the new phone. Here is what changes afterwards, and it is the part that surprises people.
\nYour old platform's backup becomes a dead end. Move from Android to iPhone and the Google Drive backup freezes at the moment you left. It cannot be restored onto an iPhone. The iPhone starts a fresh iCloud backup with no memory of the years before.
\nOn iPhone, the readable local file does not exist. This is the significant one. On Android, WhatsApp writes msgstore.db.crypt15 to the phone's storage — every message in every chat, encrypted with your own 64-digit key, and reachable with a file manager. iOS has no equivalent you can get at. After the move, your options for making a readable copy of a conversation narrow to Export chat, with its cap of 10,000 messages with media or 40,000 without.
So an Android-to-iPhone move is also, quietly, the end of your ability to take a complete archive of your own history. The chats are on the iPhone and readable in WhatsApp. Getting them out is permanently harder.
\n| Move | History reaches the new phone | Complete archive still possible afterwards |
|---|---|---|
| Android → Android | Yes, via backup restore | Yes — crypt15 plus your key |
| iPhone → iPhone | Yes, via iCloud restore | No — export only, with its caps |
| Android → iPhone | Yes, during setup | No — export only, from then on |
| iPhone → Android | Yes, during setup | Yes, from the next Android backup onward |
If the conversations matter, spend twenty minutes on the old phone before you start. Especially if you are leaving Android.
\nAndroid/media/com.whatsapp/WhatsApp/Media/ to a computer. It takes one drag and it is the cheapest insurance available.msgstore.db.crypt15 with that key in WaChat Web. Every chat, no message cap, decrypted in the browser on your own machine. Add the media folder and the photos and voice notes reattach to their messages.The order is the whole point. After the switch, route 2 is no longer available to you if you have moved to iPhone — and that is exactly when people discover they wanted it.
\nThe transfers work. Plan around three things: same number, fresh setup, and nothing wiped until it is done. Read the list on the transfer screen instead of assuming.
\nAnd if you are leaving Android, take the complete copy first. It is the last chance to do it easily.
\nSomewhere in WhatsApp's settings there is a screen showing sixty-four hexadecimal digits in groups of four. Most people see it once, screenshot it, and never think about it again. It is worth understanding, because it is the single thing standing between your entire message history and anyone who gets hold of your backup file.
\nWhen you turn on end-to-end encrypted backup, WhatsApp generates a 256-bit key on your phone. Every backup after that — the local msgstore.db.crypt15 file and the copy in your cloud account — is encrypted with a key derived from it.
Sixty-four hexadecimal digits is exactly 256 bits written out: each digit carries 4 bits, and 64 × 4 = 256.
\nThe important property: WhatsApp does not keep a copy. That is what "end-to-end encrypted backup" means. If you lose the key and forget the password, nobody — not WhatsApp, not Google, not us — can decrypt that backup. It is genuinely gone.
\nOn Android: Settings → Chats → Chat backup → End-to-end encrypted backup. If it is already on, tap through to view the key; you may have to re-enter your password or confirm your identity first.
\nIf WhatsApp offers you a passkey instead of digits, switch: turn the encrypted backup off, then on again, and choose "Use 64-digit key" rather than the password or passkey option. A passkey is convenient for restoring to a new phone, but it is held inside your device's secure hardware and cannot be exported — so no other tool can use it to read your backup.
\nThe backup file on your phone is not a database you can just open. It is ciphertext. Without the key, msgstore.db.crypt15 is noise.
WaChat asks for the key for one reason: to derive the decryption key and unwrap the file so it can read the SQLite database inside and turn it back into chats. That happens:
\nThe key is never sent to a server, never written to a log, and never included in crash reports. If you would rather not store it at all, don't — you can paste it each time and it lives only for the length of the session.
\nNever send it by email or chat. Not to us, not to support, not to anyone. Legitimate support will never ask for it. If someone does ask, that is the whole attack: your backup file is useless to them without the key, and the key is useless without the file.
\nDo not keep it in the same place as the backup. A screenshot of the key sitting in the same cloud album as an exported backup defeats the purpose entirely.
\nDo write it down. A password manager entry, or paper in a drawer. It is unrecoverable, and it is the only thing that will let you read your own archive in ten years.
\nTreat a screenshot as sensitive. Photo backups sync to the cloud, get shared into albums, and show up in "on this day" widgets on a screen someone else is looking at.
\nYou can turn the encrypted backup off and on again to generate a fresh key. Old backup files stay encrypted with the old key — so if you keep archived copies, keep the old key with them, labelled.
\nThe 64-digit key is a 256-bit secret that only you hold; it is the only way to read your own WhatsApp backup, nobody can recover it for you, and any tool worth using will keep it on your device.
\n", "date_published": "2026-08-12T00:00:00.000Z", "date_modified": "2026-08-12T00:00:00.000Z", "authors": [ { "name": "WaChat" } ], "tags": [ "key", "encryption", "backup" ], "language": "en" }, { "id": "https://wachatplus.com/en/blog/what-encrypted-whatsapp-backup-protects", "url": "https://wachatplus.com/en/blog/what-encrypted-whatsapp-backup-protects", "title": "What WhatsApp's encrypted backup actually protects", "summary": "Encrypted backup guards one specific thing: the copy of your chats in the cloud. Here is what it covers, what it does not, and the trade you are making.", "content_html": "WhatsApp has been end-to-end encrypted for years, which leads a lot of people to assume everything about it is already covered. Then a settings screen appears offering to turn on end-to-end encryption for backups, and the obvious question is what exactly was unencrypted until now.
\nThe answer is worth understanding, because this particular setting comes with a real and permanent trade-off.
\nMessages in transit have been end-to-end encrypted for a long time. A message leaves your phone encrypted and is decrypted on the recipient's phone. Nobody in between — not the network, not WhatsApp — can read it.
\nBackups at rest were a separate matter. When your phone uploaded a nightly backup to Google Drive or iCloud, that copy sat under your cloud provider's protection rather than under a key that only you hold. It was not exposed to the world, but the security model was fundamentally different from the one protecting the messages themselves.
\nEnd-to-end encrypted backup closes that gap. The backup is encrypted on your phone, before it is uploaded, with a key that WhatsApp does not keep.
\nWhen you turn it on, WhatsApp asks how you want to hold the key, and the choice matters:
\nA 64-digit key. WhatsApp generates a 256-bit key, shows it to you once as sixty-four hexadecimal digits, and keeps no copy. Nothing about it is stored on any server. It is the strongest option and the least forgiving: lose those digits and the backup is permanently unreadable.
\nA password. You choose a password, and the key is derived from it and kept in a hardware key vault that unlocks only with that password and strictly limits guessing attempts. More convenient, because you can recover a backup by remembering something. Slightly more surface area, because the key material exists somewhere other than in your head.
\nA passkey. Newer, and the default WhatsApp now offers on many devices. It ties the backup to the biometrics of your device. Very convenient for restoring to a new phone, and worth knowing about one consequence: a passkey lives inside your device's secure hardware and cannot be exported, so nothing outside WhatsApp — including WaChat — can use it to open the backup. If you want to be able to read your own backup with anything else, choose the 64-digit key instead.
\nThere is a longer piece on the 64-digit key specifically: the 64-digit key, explained.
\n| Threat | Protected? |
|---|---|
| Someone gains access to your Google or Apple account | Yes — the backup is unreadable without your key |
| Your cloud provider's staff or systems | Yes |
| A legal demand served on the cloud provider | Yes — they hold bytes they cannot decrypt |
Someone gets the crypt15 file off your phone | Yes, provided they do not also have your key |
| Someone unlocks your phone | No — WhatsApp is open on it |
| The other person in the conversation keeps their copy | No |
| Screenshots, forwards, or an export you made | No |
| You losing the key | No — and this is the risk that actually materialises |
The pattern is clear once you see it: encrypted backup protects the copy in the cloud. It does nothing about copies that exist anywhere else, and there are always copies somewhere else. Every conversation has at least two participants and at least two phones.
\nThere is no recovery path. That is not a limitation waiting to be improved; it is the entire mechanism. If WhatsApp could restore your backup for you, then WhatsApp could read your backup, and it would not be end-to-end encrypted.
\nSo turning this on moves a real risk from one place to another. Before: your backup was readable by a provider you trust to varying degrees. After: your backup is readable by nobody except you, and the odds of you losing access go up.
\nThat trade is usually worth taking. But it only works if you treat the key as something you genuinely keep — a password manager entry, or written on paper somewhere you will find it in ten years. A screenshot in your photo library is not that: photo libraries sync to the cloud, get shared into albums, and surface in "on this day" widgets while somebody else is looking at your screen.
\nThe order matters, and getting it wrong is the single most common problem people hit afterwards.
\nStep 5 is the one people skip. Generating a key does not re-encrypt the backup that already exists — yesterday's file is still sealed with yesterday's key. Until you run a fresh backup, the key you just saved and the file on your phone do not match, and any attempt to open it reports a wrong key. The wrong key article walks through the other causes.
\nEach time you turn encrypted backup off and on again, WhatsApp generates a new key. Old backup files stay locked to the old one. If you archive old backups, archive the matching key with them, labelled.
\nEncrypted backup is the reason you can read your own archive at all — and the reason nobody else can.
\nThe local file on Android, msgstore.db.crypt15, is the same encrypted database, sealed with the same key. Because you hold that key, you can decrypt it yourself and get every message in every chat, with none of the caps that apply to exporting a chat. That is what WaChat does: the decryption runs in a background worker in your browser, or inside the Android app, using your key. The key is not sent anywhere, not written to a log, and not included in crash reports. If you would rather not store it at all, paste it each time and it lives only for that session.
The same property makes one rule absolute: never send your key to anyone. Not to support, not to us, not to a service offering to help. The file alone is useless to an attacker and the key alone is useless too — the whole security model rests on those two never travelling together. Anyone asking for your key is asking for the one thing that makes your backup readable.
\nEnd-to-end encrypted backup makes the cloud copy of your chats readable by you alone. It does not protect your phone, the other person's phone, or anything you export — and it makes losing the key permanent.
\nTurn it on, choose the 64-digit key, run a fresh backup, and store the key somewhere you would store a passport.
\nText is the easy part. It is small, it survives, and it is in every backup.
\nMedia is the part that goes missing — and it usually goes missing for a dull reason: the phone was full, someone tapped "free up space", the phone was replaced, or an app that cleans storage did its job. The voice note you actually wanted is often the one that vanished.
\nIf a conversation matters to you, the media is worth rescuing deliberately rather than hoping it survives.
\nOn Android, WhatsApp keeps everything it has downloaded in one place:
\nAndroid/media/com.whatsapp/WhatsApp/Media/\nInside are folders split by type:
\n| Folder | Contents |
|---|---|
WhatsApp Images | photos, as IMG-YYYYMMDD-WAnnnn.jpg |
WhatsApp Video | videos, as VID-… |
WhatsApp Voice Notes | recorded voice notes, as PTT-….opus |
WhatsApp Audio | audio files sent as files |
WhatsApp Documents | PDFs and everything else |
WhatsApp Stickers | stickers |
WhatsApp Animated Gifs | GIFs |
Voice notes get one extra layer: they are filed into subfolders by year and week, so a real path looks like Media/WhatsApp Voice Notes/202346/PTT-20231114-WA0002.opus. That is worth knowing, because people look in WhatsApp Voice Notes, see only numbered folders, and conclude the recordings are gone.
They are .opus files. Chrome, VLC and most modern players handle them; some older desktop players and some default Windows apps do not. If a voice note will not play, the file is usually fine and the player is the problem.
On iPhone, none of this is reachable. Media stays inside the app's private storage, and the only way out is Export Chat with Attach Media.
\nYou can plug the phone into a computer and copy the whole Media folder in one go. Do it — it is the fastest possible insurance, and it takes one drag.
But understand what you have afterwards: thousands of files named IMG-20221109-WA0043.jpg, in date order, with no indication of who sent them, which conversation they came from, or what was being said around them. A photo from your sister's wedding sits next to a screenshot of a parking receipt. There is no way to tell which chat either belonged to.
The files are saved. The context is not. For a lot of people the context was the point.
\n| Route | Media it saves | Context kept | Works on |
|---|---|---|---|
Copy the Media folder | Everything still on the phone | None — filenames only | Android |
| Export chat with media | Media from the last 10,000 messages of one chat | Yes, but one chat at a time | Android and iPhone |
| Encrypted backup + media folder | Everything still on the phone | Yes, across all chats | Android |
Android/media/com.whatsapp/WhatsApp/.Media folder somewhere safe.That is the raw insurance policy. Do it before anything else, especially before switching phones.
\nYou get a text file plus the media that belongs to it, in one bundle, with the messages referring to the files by name. The limit is real and it is strict: attaching media pulls the export down to the most recent 10,000 messages, and larger videos are often dropped even inside that. For a recent conversation it is ideal. For an old one it saves the wrong end of it.
\nThis is the route that gets both the whole history and the attachments in place.
\nWhatsApp's local encrypted backup, msgstore.db.crypt15, holds every message in every chat with no cap — but it stores messages and small thumbnails, not the original files. The originals are the ones sitting in WhatsApp/Media. Bring the two together and each photo, video and voice note goes back onto the message it arrived with, because the backup records the exact path of every attachment.
In practice:
\nmsgstore.db.crypt15.WhatsApp or Media folder when it asks.In Chrome and Edge the folder is read on demand rather than copied, so a 50 GB media folder costs nothing in storage — the files are opened only when you scroll to them. Firefox and Safari use folder upload instead. Android Chrome cannot pick a folder at all, so on the phone you get messages and thumbnails and can open individual files as needed. The details per browser are in adding your media folder.
\nYou can also skip the folder during import and add it later; messages show a placeholder until you do.
\nThis is the honest part, and it is worth reading before you spend an evening trying.
\nMedia that was never downloaded to the phone is not anywhere you can reach. WhatsApp only backs up what is actually on the device. If auto-download was off and you never tapped the photo, it was never on your phone, so it is not in the backup and not in the Media folder.
\nMedia deleted from the Media folder is gone from the backup too. A storage cleaner that emptied WhatsApp Images last year removed those files from every backup made afterwards. Older backup files you kept might still reference them, but the files themselves are not coming back.
WhatsApp does not keep a copy for you. Its servers hold media only long enough to deliver it. There is no archive to ask for, by anyone, including us. When you see a message showing "media not available", that is what happened — and no tool can change it.
\nThe practical lesson is uncomfortable but simple: the time to rescue media is before you need it.
\nEverything here is about your own phone, your own backup and your own key. Reaching into someone else's conversations is not something any of this enables and not something we help with — the file and the key are both yours, and the key should never be shared with anyone, including support desks that ask.
\nCopy the Media folder today — it takes a minute and it is the cheapest protection there is. Then, if you want the media back in context rather than as a heap of filenames, pair it with the encrypted backup so every file lands on the message it belongs to.
Reading your WhatsApp history on a computer sounds like it should be simple. There is a backup, there is a computer, the two ought to meet. In practice most of the obvious routes are dead ends, and the ones that work each demand something specific.
\nHere is the whole landscape, including the parts that do not work.
\n| Method | What you need | What you get | Main limitation |
|---|---|---|---|
| WhatsApp Web or Desktop | Your phone, signed in | A live mirror of your chats | Not a backup reader; you cannot open a file, or save everything |
| Export chat | The phone, one chat at a time | A .txt plus media | Capped at 10,000 or 40,000 messages; one chat per export |
| crypt15 + your key, in a browser | The file and your 64-digit key | Every chat, media attached | Android only; you must fetch the file and the key |
| crypt15 + command-line tools | The same file and key, plus comfort with a terminal | A raw SQLite database | Raw tables, not chats; media not attached |
| Restore onto a second phone | A spare Android phone, your number | WhatsApp itself, fully restored | Wipes that phone and takes your number off your main one |
Now the detail.
\nThe first thing most people try, and the source of most of the confusion. Linking a browser or the desktop app to your phone gives you your conversations on a big screen, which feels like it solves the problem.
\nIt does not, for archiving purposes. Linked devices show a mirror of what is on your account, synced over the network. There is no way to point it at a backup file, no way to export everything, and no offline copy that survives you unlinking the device. It is a better keyboard for WhatsApp, not a reader for your history.
\nGenuinely useful, and it works from any phone including an iPhone. Export a chat from inside WhatsApp, move the file to the computer, and open it.
\nThe catch is what the export contains. WhatsApp includes only the most recent 10,000 messages if you attach media, or 40,000 without, with no warning when it truncates. And a .txt in a text editor is hard going for anything long: no bubbles, no dates that stand out, and every photo sitting in a separate pile of files named IMG-20240312-WA0007.jpg with nothing tying them to the messages they came from.
You can improve the reading experience without giving up the simplicity: dropping the ZIP into WaChat Web rebuilds the conversation with bubbles, dates, playable voice notes and search, entirely in the browser. It does not remove the export cap — nothing can, the messages are simply not in the file — but it makes what you have readable.
\nThis is the route that actually gets you everything, and it is Android only.
\nWhatsApp writes a local encrypted backup to the phone:
\nAndroid/media/com.whatsapp/WhatsApp/Databases/msgstore.db.crypt15\nThat file contains every message in every chat, with no cap, because it was built for restoring a phone rather than for sharing a conversation. It is encrypted with a key that only you hold — the 64-digit key from Settings → Chats → Chat backup → End-to-end encrypted backup.
\nWhat you need:
\nWhatsApp/Media next to it. Add that folder and attachments reattach to their messages.In WaChat Web the decryption runs in a background worker in the browser using the WebCrypto API. The file is not uploaded, the key is not sent anywhere, and a wrong key is detected within the first second rather than after processing the whole file.
\nThere are open-source scripts that decrypt a crypt15 file given the same 64-digit key. They work. It is worth being clear about what you end up with.
The output is msgstore.db, a SQLite database. Open it in a database browser and you get tables — message, chat, jid, message_media — where a conversation is a join across several of them, senders are phone-number identifiers rather than names, timestamps are numbers, and media is a set of file paths pointing at a folder the database does not contain. Getting from there to something you would actually read means writing queries.
If you are comfortable with that, it is a perfectly good route and it keeps everything in your hands. If you were hoping to double-click a file and see your chats, it is not that.
\nInstall WhatsApp on a spare phone, sign in with the same number, and restore from the backup during setup.
\nThis works, and it gives you WhatsApp itself rather than a viewer. The cost is high: your number can only be active on one phone, so doing this signs WhatsApp out on your main phone, and the spare phone needs to be wiped first. It is a reasonable move if you are retiring a device anyway, and a bad one otherwise.
\nmsgstore.db.crypt15 in a SQLite browser. It is ciphertext until it is decrypted. A database tool will just report a corrupt file..crypt14 or .crypt12 files. These predate end-to-end encrypted backup, and their key sits in WhatsApp's private app storage, which no other app can read without rooting the phone. The fix is to turn on encrypted backup with a 64-digit key and run a fresh backup, which produces a .crypt15.Storage. Decrypting happens on your machine, so it needs room: roughly one and a half times the size of the backup file, plus space for a search index. Check you have it before you start on a nearly-full laptop.
\nBrowsers. Chrome and Edge give the full experience including a proper folder picker for your media. Firefox and Safari 17 and later handle exports and single backup files but use folder upload instead. Android Chrome works with single files but cannot pick a folder. The full matrix is in supported browsers and storage.
\nYour key is a secret. No legitimate tool, service or support desk ever needs you to send it. Your backup file is useless to someone without the key, and the key is useless without the file — which is exactly why the two should never travel together.
\nIf you want one conversation and it is not enormous, export it and open the file — no key, no cable, five minutes. If you want your whole history on a computer and you are on Android, the encrypted backup with your 64-digit key is the only complete route, and it stays complete: every chat, every message, media reattached.
\nYou turned on WhatsApp's Google Drive backup years ago. It says it ran last night. So you open Drive on your computer, expecting to find a file, and there is nothing there.
\nNothing has gone wrong. The backup exists — it is just not in the part of Drive you can browse.
\nWhatsApp's backup does not go into My Drive. It goes into a separate, hidden area that Google Drive reserves for application data. Apps can write to their own space there; you cannot browse it, and no other app can see it.
\nThat is why searching Drive for msgstore, whatsapp, or .db returns nothing. The file is not missing and it is not in the Trash. It is in a place the Drive file browser does not show.
You can see that the backup exists, and how big it is, without being able to open it:
\nYou can also check from Drive's settings, under Manage apps, where WhatsApp appears with the amount of hidden app data it is storing.
\nEither view gives you exactly two useful things: proof the backup ran, and its size. What neither gives you is a download button.
\nThere are three separate walls, and you have to get past all three.
\nIt is not downloadable. The app data area is written and read by the app that owns it, through Google's API. The Drive interface exposes deletion, not download. There is no supported way to pull the backup onto a computer.
\nIt is not a file you could read anyway. Even in your hands it is not a document or an archive of chats. It is WhatsApp's internal message database plus its metadata, in a format meant for one purpose: being pushed back into a fresh WhatsApp install.
\nIt is probably encrypted with a key only you hold. If you turned on end-to-end encrypted backup, the contents are encrypted before they ever leave your phone. Google stores bytes it cannot read. Neither can anyone else — including WhatsApp, and including us.
\nPut together: the Drive copy is a restore artefact, not an archive. It has exactly one supported use — reinstalling WhatsApp on a phone with the same number and tapping Restore during setup.
\nFor a long time WhatsApp backups did not count against your Google Account quota. That has been changing, and on accounts where the change has rolled out they now count like anything else.
\nThe backups view shows the current size for your account, which is the only answer that is reliable for you specifically. If it is large, the usual cause is videos: WhatsApp's backup settings have a separate Include videos toggle, and turning it off shrinks the backup dramatically at the cost of not restoring videos to a new phone.
\nOn Android there is a second copy of the same data, and this one you can reach. WhatsApp writes a local encrypted backup on the phone itself:
\nAndroid/media/com.whatsapp/WhatsApp/Databases/msgstore.db.crypt15\nAlongside it are dated copies from previous days, named like msgstore-2026-06-20.1.db.crypt15. The one without a date is the newest.
This file has the properties the Drive copy lacks:
\nThat is the route worth knowing about. The import guide covers finding the file and getting the key, and there is a help article on finding the crypt15 file if you just need the path.
\nOne thing the backup does not contain: the media itself. It holds your messages and small thumbnails, while the actual photos, videos and voice notes live next door in the WhatsApp/Media folder. If you want the attachments back with the messages, you need that folder too.
It helps to keep these straight, because they are constantly confused with each other:
\n| Copy | Where | Can you open it? | What it holds |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google Drive backup | Drive's hidden app area | No — restore to a phone only | Everything, for restoring |
Local msgstore.db.crypt15 | On the phone's storage | Yes, with your 64-digit key | Every message in every chat |
| "Export chat" ZIP | Wherever you saved it | Yes, it is plain text | One chat, capped at 10,000 or 40,000 messages |
The same idea, different provider. iPhone backups go to iCloud, into the space iCloud reserves for app data, and they are equally unbrowsable. There is no local database file you can pick up either, so on iPhone the export is the only route to a readable copy of a chat.
\nThis causes enough confusion that it is worth stating plainly: WaChat does not and cannot read WhatsApp's Google Drive backup. Nobody outside WhatsApp can.
\nWaChat has its own hidden app folder in your Drive, which is a different folder entirely, holding a different thing: the chats you chose to import, in our format, written by you. We only ever hold the drive.appdata permission, which means we can see our own folder and nothing else in your Drive — not your documents, not your photos, and not WhatsApp's backup. You can delete our folder at any time from Drive's Manage apps, and that removes the copy everywhere at once. The full list of what we can and cannot see is in what we can see.
The Drive backup is real, but it is a restore artefact stored in an area you cannot browse, in a format you could not read, quite possibly under a key only you hold. Do not plan an archive around it.
\nIf you want a readable copy of your history on Android, the local msgstore.db.crypt15 file plus your 64-digit key is the route that works — every chat, no message cap, decrypted on your own device. The import guide has the whole sequence, and where WhatsApp keeps the file has the exact path.
Exporting a chat is the one thing WhatsApp lets you do with your own history without any extra tool. It takes about thirty seconds. It is also less complete than most people assume, and it is worth knowing exactly what you are getting before you rely on it.
\nHere are the steps on both platforms, then a look inside the file itself.
\nIncluding media produces a .zip. Choosing without media may produce a plain .txt instead, depending on how you share it.
The iPhone route matters more than it looks: iPhone has no accessible local backup file, so this is the only way to get a chat off an iPhone in a form another program can read.
\nOpen the ZIP and you find one text file plus the media, sitting loose in the same folder.
\nThe text file is named after the conversation — on Android something like WhatsApp Chat with Sara.txt, on iPhone usually _chat.txt. Inside, every message is one line, and the line format differs by platform:
12/03/2024, 21:14 - Sara: are you coming tomorrow? (Android)\n[12/03/2024, 21:14:09] Sara: are you coming tomorrow? (iPhone)\nMessages that run over several lines simply continue on the next line with no timestamp, which is how a reader can tell them apart from a new message.
\nAttachments are referenced by filename, again differently per platform:
\nIMG-20240312-WA0007.jpg (file attached) (Android)\n<attached: 00000042-PHOTO-2024-03-12.jpg> (iPhone)\nAndroid's naming is predictable and tells you the type at a glance:
\n| Prefix | What it is |
|---|---|
IMG- | photo |
VID- | video |
PTT- | voice note (push to talk), an .opus file |
AUD- | an audio file that was sent as a file |
STK- | sticker |
GIF- | animated GIF |
DOC- | document |
If you chose Without media, every one of those lines is replaced with <Media omitted> instead — the message stays, the content is gone.
This is the part that catches people out. WhatsApp does not export the whole conversation. It exports the most recent messages until it hits a cap:
\n| Export option | Messages included | Media |
|---|---|---|
| Include media / Attach Media | most recent 10,000 | photos, voice notes and smaller files; large videos are often skipped |
| Without media | most recent 40,000 | none — every attachment becomes <Media omitted> |
There is no warning, no marker in the file, and no line saying anything was left out. The text simply begins mid-conversation on some arbitrary day.
\nSo you are forced to choose between the whole conversation as bare text, or roughly a quarter of it with pictures. For a chat a few months old, neither limit matters. For a family group running since 2019, both do. There is more on where these numbers come from and how to check whether yours was cut in why WhatsApp's export stops at 40,000 messages.
\nEven inside the limits, the export is a flattening. It is a text file, so anything that is not text has to be thrown away or turned into text:
\nNone of this is a bug. Export was designed for handing one conversation to someone else — a receipt, an argument, a thread you need to forward to a lawyer — not for archiving five years of your life.
\nA .txt file opens in any text editor, and for a short chat that is genuinely enough. For anything longer it becomes unreadable quickly: no bubbles, no sender colours, and the media sitting in a separate pile of files named IMG-20240312-WA0007.jpg with nothing connecting them to the messages they belong to.
Dropping the ZIP or TXT into WaChat Web puts it back together: messages in bubbles with dates, media matched to the message that contained it, voice notes playable, and search across the whole file. It runs entirely in the browser — the file is read on your device and nothing is uploaded.
\nIf your export was truncated, WaChat also tells you so rather than letting you assume the file is complete.
\nBe honest with yourself about the size of the conversation. If it is longer than the caps, exporting gives you a partial archive that looks complete, which is worse than knowing you have a partial one.
\nOn Android there is a route with no cap at all: WhatsApp's own encrypted backup, msgstore.db.crypt15, holds every message in every chat, and you can open it with your own 64-digit key. That is a longer setup — you need the key and the file — but it is the difference between a fragment and the whole thing.
On iPhone that file is not reachable, so the export really is your only option. In that case, export without media to get the longer 40,000-message history, and if you also need the photos, export a second time with media and keep both files.
\nThe export takes half a minute and works on every phone. It gives you the most recent 10,000 messages with media, or 40,000 without, and flattens replies and reactions on the way out. For a recent conversation that is fine. For a long one it is a fragment.
\n