WhatsApp Business backup: how to back up and restore without losing chats

Published on October 17, 2026

On WhatsApp Business, your chats with customers are also your business’s history: the quote you sent, the delivery address, the time you agreed on.

If your phone breaks or goes missing and there’s no backup, all of that goes with it.

The WhatsApp Help Center is blunt about it: WhatsApp can’t restore, transfer or delete your chats for you.

The backup is your only safety net, and it has to be on before something goes wrong.

Where the copy lives

The app gives you two places to keep your backup, and you can switch between them under Settings, Chats, Chat backup, according to the official Android backup page:

WhatsApp cloud storage: the copy stays with WhatsApp itself and is always end-to-end encrypted. Meta notes that the feature is still being tested and may not show up for you yet.
Google Account or iCloud: on Android, the copy goes to your Google storage. On iPhone, it goes to iCloud, which is managed by Apple, per the iPhone backup page.

How to turn on automatic backups

On Android, go to Settings, Chats, Chat backup and Back up.

Pick a schedule other than Never or “Only when I tap Back up”, select your Google Account and decide whether to include videos and back up over cellular data, per the official Android backup page.

The first backup usually takes a while, so keep the phone on Wi-Fi and plugged in, as the page on Google Account backups recommends.

On iPhone, go to Settings (or your profile picture), Chats, Chat backup and Auto backup, then choose daily, weekly or monthly.

Your iCloud account and your iPhone both need free space of at least 2.05 times the size of the backup, according to the iPhone backup page.

For a business phone, we recommend backing up daily, because anything that came in after the last backup won’t come back.

And before you switch phones, it’s worth tapping Back up (on Android) or Back up now (on iPhone) so you’ve got that day’s copy, following the official steps for Android and iPhone.

What’s included and what’s left out

Here’s what goes into the backup, according to the official restore page:

Messages and media from your chats, including communities.
Videos, but only if Include videos was turned on before your latest backup.
Updates from the channels you follow. Channel media is only included if you’re an admin.
Nothing sent or received after your latest backup.

The mistakes that wipe your history

There’s only one backup per account, and each new backup replaces the previous one.

You can’t go back to an older version, according to the restore page.

That’s why tapping Skip instead of Restore after reinstalling the app is risky: the next backup writes over the old one with only your new chats, and the older history is gone.

On a Google Account, a backup that hasn’t been updated in five months may be deleted by Google.

And if your account runs out of space, backups stop until you free some up, per the page on Google Account backups.

A backup that’s more than 120 days old may not be restorable, even if your account is still active.

And a backup made on Android won’t restore on an iPhone, or the other way around: in that case, the recommended path is to transfer your chats straight from the old phone, according to the iPhone restore page.

If you turn on end-to-end encrypted backup, under Chats, Chat backup, End-to-end encrypted backup, you’ll set up a passkey, a password or a 64-digit encryption key.

The official Android backup page warns that this password or key is the only way to open your backup later.

Keep it somewhere safe that doesn’t depend on one person’s memory.

How to restore on a new phone

On Android, according to the restore page:

Check under Settings, Chats, Chat backup that you can see the time and size of your last backup.
Uninstall and reinstall the app, using the same phone number the backup was made with.
When prompted, tap Restore. Don’t tap Skip.

On iPhone, first turn on iCloud Drive sync in your iPhone Settings and make sure WhatsApp is on in the list of apps syncing to iCloud Drive.

Then reinstall the app, verify your phone number and Apple ID and tap Restore Chat History, according to the iPhone restore page.

If you haven’t turned on two-step verification or encrypted backup, the app may ask for a code by text or call to confirm it’s you, per the same restore page.

The new phone also needs more free space than the size of the backup, or the restore may only come through partway.

What the backup doesn’t solve

A backup keeps what’s already been said.

It doesn’t answer the customer who writes in while you’re reinstalling the app, setting up the new phone or waiting for the restore to finish.

Where we come in

We set up the assistant on your business’s WhatsApp with your own content, books on your real calendar when that’s what’s needed, and hands anything off-script to a person.

Every conversation is logged, so an important chat doesn’t depend only on the copy saved on your phone.