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This is great to see, particularly as WhatsApp currently handles this entirely incompetently despite claiming that the feature exists, providing no accurate or

This is great to see, particularly as WhatsApp currently handles this entirely incompetently despite claiming that the feature exists, providing no accurate or sane documentation about local backups. I recently had the issue for the second time of losing over a year of messages due to dysfunctional WhatsApp backups, about which I wrote a blog post of complaints/rants [1]. The user, as far as I can tell at least on Android, currently has no viable option besides uploading their messages, unencrypted, to Google. [1] https://vinayh.com/posts/2021-08-28/ https://vinayh.com/posts/2021-08-28/

ars 5y ago
I hate WhatsApp, it has a habit of losing messages. And transferring WhatsApp to a new phone is almost impossible to do without losing some messages EVEN if your current phone still works. You have to hit the backup button, and hope it finishes and sends everything to Google before you get a new messages from anyone. If you do get a messages, press backup and try again (or just lose that message). Recently I had the misfortune of trying to transfer WhatsApp from a phone that took 22 hours to finish each backup - so there was no other option except lose messages. And if your phone is dead, you are all but guaranteed to lose messages, since it uses the last backup. It gets worse - if you delete photos from your WhatsApp storage, WhatsApp does not delete them from the Google backup. If you do this for long enough you can end up with a Google backup too large to restore to any phone (or at least too large to fit in your current phone - I guess you could buy a 256GB model). You have to delete the Google backup every once in a while, and then quickly backup again (which takes hours or days, since it has to re-upload every single photo and video you have). All WhatsApp needs to do to fix this is: a: continuous backups - you get a message, it saves that message to google, or b: save at least 1 month worth of old messages, so that it has them in case you need to restore from an old backup. (It could prune old message every time you finish a backup.) And don't get me started on the misery that is losing your phone, or it breaks, and you are without a phone for a little while - you have zero options of getting messages. At least with SMS you could put the SIM card in a loaner phone, but WhatsApp probably won't fit in some cheap phone without much storage. I hate WhatsApp with a passion, and I wish it didn't exist - but I have no choice but to use it, since all my contacts don't even seem to understand what a regular text even is. And I can guarantee that this encrypted backup with cause lots and lots of people to lose their messages.
- baby 5y ago
  Multi device is in beta now

ars 5y ago

I hate WhatsApp, it has a habit of losing messages. And transferring WhatsApp to a new phone is almost impossible to do without losing some messages EVEN if your current phone still works. You have to hit the backup button, and hope it finishes and sends everything to Google before you get a new messages from anyone. If you do get a messages, press backup and try again (or just lose that message). Recently I had the misfortune of trying to transfer WhatsApp from a phone that took 22 hours to finish each backup - so there was no other option except lose messages. And if your phone is dead, you are all but guaranteed to lose messages, since it uses the last backup. It gets worse - if you delete photos from your WhatsApp storage, WhatsApp does not delete them from the Google backup. If you do this for long enough you can end up with a Google backup too large to restore to any phone (or at least too large to fit in your current phone - I guess you could buy a 256GB model). You have to delete the Google backup every once in a while, and then quickly backup again (which takes hours or days, since it has to re-upload every single photo and video you have). All WhatsApp needs to do to fix this is: a: continuous backups - you get a message, it saves that message to google, or b: save at least 1 month worth of old messages, so that it has them in case you need to restore from an old backup. (It could prune old message every time you finish a backup.) And don't get me started on the misery that is losing your phone, or it breaks, and you are without a phone for a little while - you have zero options of getting messages. At least with SMS you could put the SIM card in a loaner phone, but WhatsApp probably won't fit in some cheap phone without much storage. I hate WhatsApp with a passion, and I wish it didn't exist - but I have no choice but to use it, since all my contacts don't even seem to understand what a regular text even is. And I can guarantee that this encrypted backup with cause lots and lots of people to lose their messages.

baby 5y ago
Multi device is in beta now