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Besides cloud backup, which you may want to avoid for security reasons (explained below), exporting your WhatsApp content is one way to save important media and information from your phone. But phones can get lost, stolen, or destroyed. WhatsApp deletes messages from their servers either after they are delivered or after 30 days. WhatsApp messages and media are stored on your phone, not on WhatsApp’s servers. In case your phone gets lost, stolen or broken.A good organization and storage plan can enable you to reliably locate and retrieve your content whenever you need it. You can decide how to organize it, where it is stored, how many copies you have, who has access, and how you want to preserve it in the long-term. Even if WhatsApp disappears, you will still have your information. To preserve evidence and information outside of a proprietary systemĮxporting information from a closed system like WhatsApp allows you to have control over its preservation.For example, you can export a video from WhatsApp to use it in a report, share it with non-WhatsApp users, analyse it for veracity, or edit it into your own video. This information can be used outside of WhatsApp for research, journalistic purposes, fact-checking, mobilization, or in courts of law. Important evidence and information is being shared on WhatsApp, from videos of human rights abuses to images created to misinform. To make use of important evidence and information beyond WhatsApp.Why would you want to export content off WhatsApp? See our tutorial on backing up on WhatsApp. This exported content cannot be restored to your WhatsApp account like a backup can, but is useful if you want to save important content outside of WhatsApp. mp4 files) for access and use beyond WhatsApp. Instead, this tutorial walks you through exporting content (e.g.txt and. Backups are designed for restoring your WhatsApp account, for example if you are changing phones, and are stored in an encrypted WhatsApp database format that cannot be opened or read outside of WhatsApp. Since WhatsApp is a closed platform, we have to use its own built-in tools to access, download, and export the content.Įxporting content is different from backing up your WhatsApp. This tutorial, put together by WITNESS, walks you through how to download and export your chat messages, videos, photos, and other media from WhatsApp along with basic metadata. The messaging platform WhatsApp has 1.5 billion users worldwide and is increasingly being used as a tool to organize, mobilize, as well as to share important human rights content.
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