This guide will show you how to recover old WhatsApp messages on iPhone, including the method to recover 4 year old WhatsApp messages without backup.
In November 2009, WhatsApp appeared in the App Store for the first time. After all these years, it has become the most popular instant messaging app in the world. Do you remember when you started using WhatsApp? Well, no matter how many years, WhatsApp contains a lot of important chats, after all, we use it every day.
However, there are various circumstances that can lead to WhatsApp data loss. Therefore, sometimes we need to restore WhatsApp chats on iPhone. If the messages you need are from a few years ago, then you may want to know how to recover old WhatsApp messages on iPhone. Read on to get 3 proven solutions.
Before we start, let's see if you can recover 1 or 4 year old WhatsApp messages on iPhone. Generally speaking, there are two ways to recover old WhatsApp messages.
● Option 1. Recover old WhatsApp messages on iPhone from backup. WhatsApp knows the messages are important to you so it provides a backup solution. Have you ever backed up WhatsApp? If you have a backup available, then you can simply uninstall and reinstall WhatsApp to recover the old messages you need. ● Option 2. Recover old WhatsApp messages on iPhone without backup. If there is no backup available, then you can rely on a third-party WhatsApp data recovery app to get back your old WhatsApp messages. But most of the data recovery apps are not for free.
You can keep reading to learn more details about how to recover old WhatsApp messages on iPhone.
If you have backed up WhatsApp before losing your messages, then you can recover old WhatsApp messages on iPhone from that backup.
Go to Settings of WhatsApp > Chats > Chat Backup to check if there’s a backup available. It will show the time when the backup is completed and you can speculate whether the backup contains the data you need based on this time.
If you decide to recover old WhatsApp messages from iCloud backup, follow the steps below.
1. Uninstall and reinstall WhatsApp.
2. Open WhatsApp > Enter your phone number and verification code.
3. When WhatsApp finds your backup, tap Restore Chat History and wait for the process.
If you have ever backed up your iPhone with iTunes, then you can try to recover old WhatsApp messages from iTunes backup. You can go to iTunes backup location on your computer and see if there is a backup. On Windows 11/10/8, iTunes backups are usually stored in C:\Users\[PC name]\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\ MobileSync\ Backup.
However, iTunes only supports full backup and restore, which means it will restore WhatsApp as well as other content. If you don’t mind, follow the steps below to restore iTunes backup.
1. Connect your iPhone to computer and launch iTunes.
2. Click the Device icon.
3. Choose Summary > Select This Computer > Click Restore Backup > Select the backup you need and click Restore to confirm.
📝 To ensure a smooth recovery, you can choose Help from the menu bar and then Check for Update to update iTunes to the latest version.
In most cases, we can restore WhatsApp backup to get back lost messages. However, WhatsApp keeps only the most recent backups. Therefore, it can be difficult to retrieve messages from a long time ago.
If you want to know how to recover 1 year old WhatsApp messages or how to recover 4 year old WhatsApp messages without backup, then iCloud backup is helpless. In these cases, you can turn to a professional WhatsApp data recovery tool. Although most of these tools are fee-based, they offer free trial versions. You can try first to see if you can find the messages you need.
Here we take FoneTool as an example to show you how to recover old or deleted WhatsApp messages without backup.
1. Download and install FoneTool on your PC > connect your iPhone to the computer with the USB cable.
2. Navigate to Toolbox >Select iOS Data Recovery.
3. Check the files icon that you want to restore from WhatsApp, like photos, videos, contacts, app documents, etc. > Then click Start Scan to scan the iPhone data.
4. We take recover the photos from WhatsApp messages as an example, tap Photos > select the deleted photo > Then click Recover to PC to retrieve them to your computer.
That’s all about how to recover old WhatsApp messages on iPhone. If there is a backup available, you can reinstall WhatsApp to get back the old messages. If you want to recover messages from 1 year or 4 years ago, then there may be no backup. In this case, you can rely on WhatsApp recovery software to find the old message you need.