# Unable to Back Up/Restore WhatsApp Chat History to iPhone



## jampot (Jul 10, 2002)

I have an old iPhone 5 that I am trying to back up and restore to a new iphone 7 in particular all of the WhatsApp chat history, videos, pics etc.

This is my wife's phone and I have little if no knowledge of iphones or iOS.

I would say at this point that somehow all of her photos have automatically transferred across to the new phone which although great is confusing as to how this has happened so easily when I am having so much trouble transferring a few chats (actually more than a few) plus videos, baby pics, etc

I have gone through all the normal trouble shooting processes:

1. There is sufficient iCloud storage capacity (I have a 50GB data plan)
2. Both iCloud Drive and WhatsApp are toggled on
3. I have tried turning the phone on and restarting it

I even thought it might be linked to the fact that there were no contacts set up on the new iPhone but having imported those the problem still remains.

Hitting iCloud shows the following:
Manage Storage > Backups 1.4GB > Documents and Data > This iPhone 1.4GB > Last Backup 30/01/2020 > Backup Size 1.47GB > Next Backupsize 745.7MB > Choose Data to Back Up >* WhatsApp 1.87GB (toggled on) *

There are also a number of other apps backed up but it is WhatsApp that is my main concern

*Incidentally there is also a 3.6GB file of Photos but as previously mentioned they appear to have automatically transferred across to the new phone, I'm guessing because they're not part of the actual back up, and so are treated separately*

Switching to WhatsApp

Settings > Chats > Chat Backup

I have a spinning iCloud icon 'Last Backup 21/04/2020 Total Size 1.1MB
*(I would add that this was when I installed Whatsapp on the new iPhone 7 and then hit back up so I guess as the original chats had not transferred across as I'd hoped, I was essentially backing up virtually nothing hence the small file size)*

There were a couple of old group chat headers that appeared in the new phone but no proper chat history

Below this is the dreaded spinning wheel under 'Backing Up' with *'Uploading180bytes of 426MB (0%)'

I will say at this point that all the chats are viewable on the old phone.*

I am confused as to why there appears to be two separate file sizes for Whatsapp
1.87GB showing under the iCloud
427MB under the WhatsApp settings.

The other thing is that when I was setting up the new iPhone I had the option of 'Restoring from Previous Backup' which I did not use.
I am tempted to reset the new iPhone and try this again now that I know that there is a backup to 30/01/2020 at least.

What stopped me was the thought that at the moment at least the new iPhone has all her photos on it and I was worried that these might not transfer again.

Is this a option you would recommend?

Sorry message is long but I wanted to try and explain the problem as best as I could.

I would be grateful for any help as my wife is driving me up the wall after literally every five minutes asking 'Have you done it yet'😩

Thanks again.


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## jampot (Jul 10, 2002)

Hi there,
Just hoping someone can help with my data transfer issue.
Thanks!


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