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What happens when you export a chat on WhatsApp?

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What happens when you export a chat on WhatsApp?
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Unlike a traditional backup, an export is human-readable. Exporting a WhatsApp chat will create a file which you can read your conversation from, and even print it out. You can also choose which conversations to export, unlike a backup which will automatically back up every conversation. 

Depending on your settings, you can back up your WhatsApp chats to Google Drive. If you uninstall WhatsApp from your phone but don't want to lose any of your messages, be sure to manually back up your chats to Google Drive before uninstalling. 

WhatsApp stores chats to your phone’s WhatsApp database daily in order to recover them in the event of corruption. WhatsApp recommend using Google Drive to back up your entire chat and media history. 

  • If you're in Germany, you might have to update WhatsApp before you can use the export chat feature. 
  • If you choose to attach media, the most recent media sent will be added as attachments. 
  • When exporting with media, you can send up to 10,000 latest messages. Without media, you can send 40,000 messages. These constraints are due to maximum email sizes. 


User reviews

R (601 reviews)

WhatsApp allows you to export chats as Plain Text, however, this does not embed your media like photos in the export. To retain the nice messaging format used in WhatsApp, and your embedded media, you can instead export as HTML or PDF.