Hi everyone! 👋 I was recently exploring how to get a local backup of WhatsApp messages from my iPhone. I switched from Android to iOS in the past and lost all of my WhatsApp messages. I wanted to make sure that if I switched again from iOS to Android I don’t lose any messages. I don’t really care if I can import the messages in WhatsApp. I just don’t want to lose all of the important information I have in my chats. I don’t have any immediate plans for switching (if ever) but it seemed like a fun challenge and so I started surveying the available tools and how they work.This was mostly a learning exercise for me regarding how Apple stores iOS backups and how I can selectively extract information and data from one. My target was to have a local copy of WhatsApp messages that I can read and search through locally. It would be doubly awesome if I can move the messages to an Android device but, as I mentioned before, that wasn’t my main aim....I hope you learned a thing or two from this article. I had a fun time diving into the weeds of iOS backups. I had no idea how Apple was storing the backup and how easy/hard it was going to be to get the particular file I wanted from that backup. Suffice to say it wasn’t too hard and taught me a few fun things in the process.
Gast
