The best way to ensure that you never lose a precious WhatsApp chat is to export it and keep it safe. Please note that these saved chats they cannot be used to import them back on WhatsApp. For this you still need to make a backup on Google Drive.
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How to export a WhatsApp chat
Exporting WhatsApp chats and saving a backup are two actions with the same objective: Safeguard your chats, but they work differently. The backup is not meant to be accessed by you, and is actually semi-hidden in Google Drive. It’s not for you, it’s for WhatsApp itself.
Secondly, export a chat is a function for your own reference, since the chats saved like this cannot be used to put them back into the application. They serve you to consult chats, but not for WhatsApp.
Having established the difference, let’s see how you can save a particular WhatsApp chat. First of all you must open said chat, and then touch the menu button and choose Plus in the drop down menu. choose then export chat.
This option is far from being new, although it may sound like it used to be called Send chat by mail. The new name gives us the clue that it can now be save and send a chat by other apps beyond mail, such as Telegram, Google Drive, Bluetooth or, yes, Gmail.
Before that, however, you must choose if you want to include the media files or not. By multimedia files, WhatsApp means anything that is not a text message, including voice messages, photos, videos, stickers, animated GIFs or documents.
if you choose no filesa single TXT file will be created with the entire conversation and nothing else, but if you choose include files all media files will be sent separately in the chat. This can easily mean tens or hundreds of files, although it is probably the option that interests you if you want to keep a chat safe.
Then comes the turn choose the application in the standard Android document sharing box. Only those applications capable of supporting the sending of several files at the same time will be shown, such as Telegram, Google Drive, Gmail or WhatsApp itself.
What happens next depends on which app you have chosen. For example, in Google Drive you must choose in which folder the files will be saved, while in Gmail a new message will be composed. Interestingly, if you share it with Telegram it will be imported as a conversation, this being an alternative way to take your chats wherever you want.
The result is functional, albeit messy.
After exporting a chat, what is the result? In all cases, you will have a txt file with the text of the conversation, without format but including the date and time of each message. The emojis included in the messages remain saved, although it depends on your text editor to show them or not.
As you can see in the screenshot above, each time a media element is included in the chat, it is included a reference to the file name in the text. These multimedia elements are saved separately, so it will be you who must read the chat and then look for the photo or sticker that goes in each place.
The method to export chats in WhatsApp hardly changed for years, and the truth is that it would not have cost much to generate a ZIP file with an HTML that shows the conversation in a more readable way. For now, this is what it is. If you have a spare afternoon and have some knowledge of Python, this script You can convert the TXT to a slightly more readable HTML file, although the images and files are still separate.