Keeping WhatsApp messages from someone you have lost
After someone dies, your WhatsApp conversation with them can become one of the most personal things you have. It is also more fragile than it looks, because it lives on one phone, inside one app. This guide covers how to keep it safe.
You do not have to read it to keep it
Many people are not ready to scroll back through the chat for a long time, and that is fine. Saving it does not mean reading it. You can make a copy, put it somewhere safe, and open it only when you want to.
The one reason not to wait too long is that the chat sits on your phone. Phones break, get lost, get replaced, and get reset, and a conversation that was never saved goes with them. A copy protects you from all of that.
Your conversation is already on your phone
You do not need their phone or their account. Every message they sent you, and every message you sent them, is in the chat on your own phone, and that is what you save. The same goes for family groups they were part of.
While you decide what to do, do not clear or delete the chat. If seeing it at the top of your chats is hard, archive it instead. Archiving hides a chat from the list without deleting anything.
If the chat has disappearing messages turned on, turn them off in the chat info so the messages still there stay, then save the chat straight away.
Save the whole conversation
Keep both files exactly as they came. You can always make a readable copy later, but you cannot remake the original once the chat is gone.
- Open your chat with them.
- On Android, tap the three-dot menu, then More, then Export chat. On iPhone, tap their name at the top, then Export chat near the bottom.
- Choose Include media, so photos and voice notes come with it where WhatsApp can attach them.
- Save it somewhere you control, such as cloud storage or your computer, rather than only sending it in a message.
- Make a second export Without media as well. It is smaller and can carry more of the older text.
Photos, videos, and voice notes
Voice notes are often what people most want to keep, because they hold someone’s voice. An export with media includes them where it can, but WhatsApp attaches the most recent media rather than every file in a long chat, so do not rely on the export alone for the ones that matter most.
Open their contact info and look through the chat’s media. Save the photos, videos, and voice notes you want one by one, to your phone’s photo library, your files, or cloud storage.
Voice notes are saved as Opus audio files. Phones play them, and if a computer will not, a media player that supports Opus will.
Keep it somewhere it will last
Keep at least two copies in different places, such as one in cloud storage and one on a computer or an external drive. Name the folder so it will still make sense years from now, with their name and the dates the chat covers.
Keep WhatsApp’s own chat backup turned on too. It is not a file you can open, but it means the chat comes back if you set WhatsApp up on a new phone.
Other family members may want a copy. Decide together who keeps it, especially for a family group, where the messages belong to several people.
When you are ready to read it
A raw export is a long text file with a timestamp on every line, which is a hard way to reread a conversation that matters. A chat export viewer lays the messages out as they looked in WhatsApp, so you can read them in order, or search for a word, a place, or a date you remember.
Some people want to share one exchange with family: a particular conversation, a joke, the last messages. Preserve lets you choose a first and last message and share just that part as a page people can open on their phones, without handing anyone the whole chat.
A shared page stays until you delete it. It does not expire on its own. Keep the link you are given when you create it somewhere safe, because that link is how you manage the page later.
Their account and their number
WhatsApp can delete an account after a long period of inactivity, and mobile carriers eventually reissue phone numbers. Neither is a reason to rush, but both are reasons to keep your own copy rather than relying on the chat staying as it looks today.
If their number is later given to someone else, a stranger may appear under it in WhatsApp. Keep that in mind before sending a message to the old chat.