Thankfully, there’s hope for you if you accidentally delete a message. It’s useful to know this because a lot of people use WhatsApp for important business matters, so you don’t want to delete any crucial messages. You could lose important information or, you know, your job. If you found yourself in that tricky situation, here’s a handy how-to guide to getting them back.
How to restore your deleted WhatsApp messages
While WhatsApp does a lot of different things, it doesn’t have the function to immediately restore deleted messages. Because of this, you’ll this there are workarounds that may or may not work. They depend on the situation and the timing above all.
Ask for a resend from the other users
To start off, here’s a more straightforward method of getting the missing message back. If you accidentally deleted a message, there’s a 50/50 chance that you either marked “Delete for everyone” or “Delete for me”. If you tapped the former, then this method won’t work.
However, if you tapped the “Delete for me” option, then you will be in luck. When you mark that option, you’ll see the message delete completely from your view. If you’d marked the other option, the chat bubble will still be there, but it will have the text “You deleted this message”. That will show up for everyone in the chat thus rendering this method ineffective. However, if you just deleted the message for you, you can just ask one of the other people in your chat to copy the message you deleted and paste it back into the chat. Since you deleted it only for yourself, it’ll still be available to the other members. That’s an easy way to get the message back in a pinch.
Restoring from a backup
If you deleted the message for the whole chat, then there’s a chance that you could restore it. Just know that this heavily depends on the timing, so it’s not guaranteed to work. For this method to work, you’ll need to have had the app backup to Google Drive. If the app backed up after the message was written but before you deleted them, then you’ll be able to restore it. If not, then you’re, unfortunately, out of luck. On your WhatsApp home screen, tap on the three-dot menu on the top right of the screen, and tap on Settings. From there, go to the Chats page, and tap on Chat backup at the bottom of the screen. On the next page, you’ll see a green “Backup” button; DO NOT tap it. At the top of that page, you’ll see the last time your chats were backed up. Look at the date it was last backed up to Google Drive above the backup button. If it backed up before the message was deleted, then you can proceed.
At this point, uninstall the app. If the system asks if you want it to keep the saved app data, don’t check the option. After you uninstall the app, reinstall it. When you start the app, you’ll be greeted with the setup screen again. After you grant the app the standard permissions and reenter your phone number, you’ll be asked to restore your chats from Google Drive. Tap the Restore button on the bottom. From there, the app will pull the saved chats from your Google Drive and restore your chats. After that, you’ll see your chats as they were before the deletion. This includes the messages that you accidentally deleted.
More WhatsApp How-To’s
WhatsApp has this annoying 100MB file limit, and that can be frustrating. Sometimes, you need to send important files to your contacts and clients, and getting the “Unable to send” message can be infuriating. Unfortunately, there’s no native way for you to send larger files in the app, so you’ll need to use other methods to do this. If you need to send larger files, then you shouldn’t worry. We have a handy how-to guide to help you send files that are larger than the size limit.
