Which is the most important app on your phone? No matter how you use your phone, chances are highly likely that your answer is “WhatsApp.” And when you think about it, it is not surprising at all, as the prevalence of WhatsApp in modern smartphones is just as inevitable and indispensable as the functionality to connect to the internet. We all need our phones to carry out our daily lives. And we need WhatsApp to facilitate much of the communications that happen in our daily lives.
Today, the significance of the platform is that it is no longer a mere messaging platform. WhatsApp chats store the funniest of conversations, the most serious of discussions, important passwords, images, videos, documents, and, most important of all, memories. WhatsApp has become a virtual place to hang out with anyone and talk about anything and everything.
As such, losing your WhatsApp chats is not something you would ever want to experience firsthand. And that’s why WhatsApp maintains a backup of your chats regularly. These backups– stored locally on your device and saved to Google Drive if enabled– give a second life to our past messages when we install WhatsApp on a new phone or reinstall it on the same phone.
In certain situations, though, you might want to restore multiple WhatsApp Backups at once. But is it possible to do that?
Read on to know whether you can restore multiple WhatsApp backups.
How do WhatsApp backups work?
WhatsApp backups are the key to recovering your messages and other media whenever you need to uninstall or reinstall WhatsApp on your phone or install WhatsApp on a new device. Your WhatsApp messages and media are backed up regularly in two ways:
1. Local Backups (stored offline in your device)
2. Google Drive backups (stored online in your Google Drive account)
WhatsApp backs up your chats every day between 2-3 AM local time. These everyday backups are stored locally in your device so that you can access them if you uninstall and reinstall WhatsApp.
In addition to storing the latest backup, WhatsApp also stores the backups of the last seven days. So, if you want to restore earlier chats, excluding the last day’s chats, you can restore an earlier backup.
Google Drive backups are a bit different from local backups. You can set the frequency of saving these backups on your own or even turn them off. These backups are linked to your Google account and WhatsApp number. So, if you ever change your device, you need to be signed into the correct Google account to restore your chats from Google Drive.
There is an important difference between local backups and Google Drive backups that concerns the topic of this blog. Unlike local backups, there is only one backup file stored in Google Drive at any time. Whenever you update the Google Drive backup, any existing backup is overwritten by the updated backup.
So, if you want to restore multiple backups on WhatsApp, there is no way you can do that in the case of Google Drive backups, as there is always a single backup at any time.
How to Restore Multiple Whatsapp Backups
As discussed, WhatsApp allows users to restore backups from local storage or Google Drive.
Once you install WhatsApp on your device and verify your phone number, the app will automatically try to find and restore any available backups on the device and Google Drive– you don’t need to do anything in these cases. But sometimes, the problem of multiple backups can cause some confusion.
Can you have multiple WhatsApp backups?
On some occasions, you can have multiple backups containing different chats and want to restore all of them together. This can likely happen when you have an unrestored backup on your old device and another backup on a new device. Now, if you install WhatsApp again on any of these devices, the app will only restore the backup with the name msgstore.db.crypt14, msgstore.db.crypt12, or msgstore.db.crypt10, depending on the encryption protocol.
Of course, you can rename any backup according to the above names. But WhatsApp can restore one and only one backup file at a time. Even if you transfer multiple backups to the same device and name them as above, only one backup will get restored.
So, if you want to restore multiple WhatsApp backups, the odds are not quite in your favor. This is because WhatsApp can’t restore two or more distinct backups and merge them. The app can only restore one backup.
The problem of merging two backups
The only option is to decrypt each backup, merge all the backups, and encrypt them again. Once you have a single backup that has the correct format, WhatsApp can easily restore it.
But it is not– in any way– as simple as it sounds. In fact, it is not a very practical approach, either. Firstly, do you know how to decrypt WhatsApp backup files? Neither do we. But can someone else help you decode the backups? Now, that’s a tricky question.
Some platforms offer you the option to decrypt WhatsApp backup files, and some can also merge them. But we don’t know whether these services really do as they say. And honestly, we won’t suggest you try them either. Your WhatsApp backups contain all your text chats and other data, and giving it away to an unknown place won’t be a wise option.
The bottom line on restoring multiple backups
We can thus conclude that there is no reliable and secure way to restore multiple WhatsApp backups on your phone. So, do your research before getting help from a third-party platform or app.
Closing thoughts
WhatsApp messages might contain some very important pieces of information regarding your day-to-day lives, and losing them might be one of the most horrible things.
WhatsApp backups save the day if you ever have to change your device and install the app again. Your chats are backed up to the local storage of your device and your Google Drive according to the frequency set by you. You can restore them the next time you set up WhatsApp on your device.
But if you want to restore multiple backups, it will not be easy as WhatsApp does not restore multiple backups simultaneously. Although some platforms can possibly help you, it won’t be a great idea to let others decrypt and read your chats.
Restoring multiple WhatsApp backups might not be the option, but sharing this blog with multiple friends definitely is. Share this blog with them, and keep visiting our blog for more interesting discussions.
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