I don’t know if backing up your data this way breaches WhatsApp’s terms of service. I am not affiliated with Facebook or WhatsApp, and this investigation was done purely to preserve my personal data better. In the video below I’ve replaced contact names, text messages, and images with placeholders, although the video and audio are unchanged. If you’re in a hurry you can just head directly to the GitHub repo which contains instructions on how to run it. Your browser does not support the video tag.
I just wish there was a “I know what I am doing” button for users who want that capability. I do appreciate about WhatsApp’s focus on security and privacy, and its developers are probably well intentioned when they make it hard to extract data. However they are not easy to link with the surrounding messages. The situation for photos and videos is already acceptable, since they get saved as normal photos and videos, which are easy to back up. And since the desktop application is just a web application, it should be relatively easy to programmatically extract the messages for backup purposes. Since the desktop application can send and receive messages independently, it must also store them independently. This is why I was very excited to learn that WhatsApp is rolling out a “real” desktop application, which does not need the phone to operate. crypt12 files that WhatsApp uses, but I never bothered to root my phone, which is a requirement to get the decryption keys, and I’m generally not very familiar with Android as a platform.
On Android other users have decrypted the. In other words, I think there’s a chance that I won’t have access to my “official” WhatsApp data in a few decades. 1 I do back them up to Google Drive using the built-in backup functionality, but that data depends on me having access to my Google account, and is also not usable without the official WhatsApp app. For better of worse a large portion of my communication goes through it, and I would hate to lose some of my WhatsApp text and audio messages. These days I’m quite happy with my data situation, with one big exception: WhatsApp.
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