How to recover deleted WhatsApp messages/photos/videos in Android

WhatsApp has become one of the most reliant means of communication these days. It is not only a way of exchanging keyboard-written messages but also a bridge for sharing photos and videos of different sizes. It may feel terrible when some important piece of information, be it a video, image, or simply text, gets accidentally deleted and lost, therefore. Luckily, deleting some data in WhatsApp does not mean you are destined to lose it forever. This is what we are going to discuss below – 3 easy ways to help you recover your files deleted from WhatsApp on Android for free.

1. Recover deleted images/videos from Internal Memory Storage

WhatsApp has a setting to automatically save all received files into your Memory Storage. Unless you disabled this feature manually, your deleted files are likely to be in Memory Storage. You can try to find them using Gallery or do the following to have a more precise search:

1. On your Android smartphone, find an app called File Manager (or similarly).
2. Then, navigate to Device Storage (or Phone Storage) and locate a folder named WhatsApp.
3. Depending on what type of file you are looking for (e.g. WhatsApp Images or WhatsApp Videos), navigate to the respective folder and find your files there.

If you have not found your deleted files there, then it is likely that the feature for automatic saving is not enabled.

2. Access the recipient to re-send you the file

The easiest way to retrieve specific media files in case such were initially sent by somebody else in of your chats is to ask this person to send them again. Also, if you sent your own files, but deleted them only for yourself, the person you chatted with should have these photos or videos visible on his or her device. Thus, you can ask the person to resend them to you as well, instead of trying to use more advanced and time-consuming solutions to succeed in recovery.

3. Recover deleted files using WhatsApp backup

WhatsApp creates regular backups within a selected time frequency if your account is connected to Google Drive. Check what was the last backup WhatsApp has created and, if this backup was made before you deleted your photos or files, it can be used to recover your data. For this method, you will have to delete WhatsApp from your device and install it again so make sure your data is backed up using these steps:

To check whether you have backups in WhatsApp:

1. Open WhatsApp, click on three vertical dots in the top right corner and select Settings.
2. Navigate to Chats and Chat backup afterwards.
3. Now, you will be able to see the date of the last backup or if there are any at all. If there are no backups at all, we recommend you set it up. Although you will not be able to recover the files you lost, it is very useful in case you lose access to all the files or simply would want to set up WhatsApp on another device in the future.

Once you have finished checking your backup, you are ready to go with its application to restore lost files and chat history.

To use WhatsApp backup:

1. Uninstall WhatsApp and install it again via app market (e.g. Google Play Store).
2. Open it up and enter the phone number your account was registered with.
3. After this, WhatsApp will most probably offer you to use restore from the latest backup available. Click on Restore and wait until everything is transferred from cloud storage.

There you go. We hope this helped you get back the necessary media files or messages you needed.

Summary

We hope this guide came in handy and helped you regain access to the files you have deleted. It is always frustrating to lose some files even if they were sent by other people during a chat. Luckily, they can be recovered in most of the case so there is not a lot to worry about.