Whats App wont restore chat data but only on GOS

Kurt999

Hi, I wasn't sure where to put this as it's a TP app problem but seems to only affect GOS.

I have been using GOS for about 11 months now, I have a single user on the phone (P7). For reasons unimportant I carried out a full reset, and reinstalled my apps including WA, all from sandboxed Play Store.
I have to use What's App unfortunately
Everything except WA works as expected. During the WA setup procedure I get stuck in a loop of entering my google account details (at which time WA complains that my account already exists on the phone), deleting my Google account from the phone to enable WA to then let me put my details in again, at which point it then wants details again to access the backup on my G-Drive, but of course I have just entered them so they already exist etc etc.

I am able to progress the WA install by skipping restore and WA then behaves normally and can send and receive messages, but of course I don't have my chat history.

The reason I think this is something to do with GOS:

I have a Motorola phone as a spare on stock Android 14 (with Moto bloat of course)

I have just booted this up with my SIM and installed WA, and the whole process worked as expected, including restoring my old data.

There is no option within WA to manually restore an old backup, and in fact it is impossible to download the backup as a file from G-Drive (don't know why but both well documented on the WWW)

So I wonder if this is some sort of bug in GOS?

Incidentally I can upload and download other files from G-Drive and Proton Drive without issue

Sorry that's a bit long, Thanks for looking

DeletedUser87

Kurt999 if you were able to restore the data to the Moto, I would suggest to just transfer it from it directly like this.

jak97

Kurt999 give contacts access to Play Services before initializing Whatsapp, and try after that. I also encountered this problem and that's the solution.

KleinesSinchen

You should try as suggested above by @DeletedUser87 (which is a good possibility as long as one device with the data is operational, but ultimately failing to address the error)

========

I sadly have no solution for the underlying problem but can add a few pieces of information. The problem is not specific for GrapheneOS or Sandboxed Google Play. WhatsApp backup+restore process is a semi-working mess at best. I would even go as far as saying it is almost completely broken.

Not using WhatsApp myself I still wanted to gather experience: On a spare phone number acquired just for WA I added one contact, we sent some messages back an forth, including a picture, so I had something to backup+restore.

With this small chat history I tried my best migrating the tiny WA account from an old Sony Xperia T running Lineage 15.1 to a Huawei Mate 10 Pro (unmodified stock OS, Google apps still included by default).

Guess what happened. Exactly what you have described! Adding Google account → nothing in the list → trying the same Google account → already exists → delete → in circles. I even added the backup file to the appropriate location and tried my best with countless tutorials to convince WA in restoring the local backup. Even when finding the local file, WA simply said something like: “Could not restore any of your backups. Number of restored messages: 0”

A few days later I tried the same steps(!) on my Pixel 4a with GrapheneOS+Sandboxed Google Play. Backup from Google drive restored out of the box without any kind of tricks.

The problem you have described happened for other people as well (I was semi-active in a German android forum a few months ago seeing a lot of problems with WA restoration).

When does it happen and why? No idea.

Naudiz

I think the problem is due to the reason that GOS does not have the G-Drive Backup function embedded in the system, which regular OSs with priviledges Play Services have instead of Seedvault. I also believe this backup solution is impossible to "simulate" with Sandboxed PlayServices.

I once read that there's some rather hacky way to force WA to restore local backups instead of the G-Drive by putting the phone into Flight mode and somehow placing the backup in a very specific location, but I also remember that I did never succeed with this approach when I tried to help my wife to restore her WA chats (I myself don't use WA).
As @KleinesSinchen said: WA backup function is a broken mess.

Kurt999

Ok thank you for the replies.

@DeletedUser87 -- that didn't work either but thanks for the advice..it was worth a try

@KleinesSinchen and @Naudiz thanks for the info, I'll stop tinkering with this now and give it up as a bad job. I even did a full fresh install of GOS on my P7 just in case.

I wish I didn't have to use WA but as almost everyone I know does, and there are 2 groups I need to be on for work, my hands are tied

Kurt999

jak97

Nice one! Just did this, then uninstalled and reinstalled WA and it restored my previous backup.

Once this is done presumably I can stop sharing contacts with Play Services?

And unless I missed something, I don't have the option now to set up storage scoped for WA?

Thanks again!! 😁