Due to a bug in the latest version of WhatsApp for Android and iOS some users have lost important chats, here's how to secure the conversations
Do we have important conversations on WhatsApp? Well: if we have never done so, it's time to make a backup to archive and save the chats that most interest us. The reason is quickly said: it seems that WhatsApp has started to delete the oldest conversations present on the application and not archived.
In the past few days, several users have started to report a strange behavior of the instant messaging app owned by Facebook. Without any warning, WhatsApp started deleting messages from old chats on its own and without asking users for confirmation, which left them without very important memories and data. According to some people affected by the WhatsApp bug, the random deletion would also affect quite recent chats, and not only conversations that are years or months old. Everything seems to be caused by a bug in one of the latest versions of WhatsApp.
How to secure our chats on WhatsApp with Android
The developers of WhatsApp have already made it known that in a future update the bug will be fixed and therefore any problem related to the sudden cancellation of conversations and chats important will disappear. In the meantime, however, it is the case to take appropriate countermeasures and secure the most important conversations by making a backup. If we have an Android smartphone, the thing to do is obviously open WhatsApp, click on the icon with three dots in the upper right corner, choose Settings and then Chat. Then locate the Chat Backup feature and press on it to enter the corresponding window. In this page we will find various options, but the only one that really interests us at this juncture is Include video, which we need to activate by tapping on it. We remind you that it is advisable to back up when you are connected via Wi-Fi so as not to waste your data connection. Once all these steps are done we'll be ready to start backing up chats with a tap on the green Run Backup button. The waiting time depends on how much you've chatted and how much multimedia content you've collected over time.
If we don't want to back up all conversations, but only the most important ones, there's a very simple way to do it. We open the chat that is important to us, go to the Settings menu and then to More. At this point we choose the command Send chat via email. WhatsApp will ask us if we want to attach media content as well and in this case we choose Attach Media. After a moment we decide from the screen Send chat via which system to use. Gmail is the most recommended so that we always have the most important conversations and multimedia content at hand, alternatively we can choose Google Drive as for the backup of conversations mentioned above. Once we have chosen the destination of the chats, all we have to do is wait for the process to finish.
How to secure our chats on WhatsApp with iOS
On iPhone and iPad we can back up to iCloud. Obviously, the basic requirement is to have created a valid account on Apple's cloud platform. If we have already created our iCloud profile in the past, we don't have to worry about anything else. To start saving messages and photos we first launch the WhatsApp application, and then access the Settings. That done, all we have to do is press on Chats and then on Chat Backup. Here we'll be able to check the last date when the automatic data backup was made, the size of the backup file and we'll also find a button that allows us to backup the conversations at that precise moment. Browsing through the various settings, the user can decide the backup frequency, whether or not to include videos and other details. Once all these options are chosen, we're ready to start the process and wait for it to finish automatically.