Do you have important WhatsApp
chats that you want to save or read without having to press ‘load more’
every, single, time? Or is your WhatsApp starting to slow down because
of your bloated (and still growing) chat history and you want to free up some space without losing all those memories inside?
With the help of iPhone Backup Extractor and WhatsApp Xtract
you can save your WhatsApp chat history in your computer. With a little
bit of help from Phyton you can display the chat history in browser
view and read it whenever you want.
1. Backup and Extract WhatsApp Data
Connect your iPhone to your computer and open up iTunes. Back up your iPhone.
Note: Make sure that you create an unencrypted
backup file as the extractor in the second part of this guide cannot
handle encrypted backup files.
To extract WhatsApp data from your iPhone backed-up files, download iPhone Backup Extractor and install it. Run the program.
This program will auto-locate the location of your backup files. If
your folder is not in the located folder, click the drop-down and
‘Select another backup folder’ and locate your iPhone backup folder.
After locating the backup files, click on Expert Mode.
Then, click on ‘Application’ to expand it. Find ‘net.WhatsApp.WhatsApp’ and tick on the box next to it. Then click on Extract selected.
The extracted files will be placed in a folder named ‘Application’.
The ‘Application’ folder can be located at the directory you chose after
clicking ‘Extract selected’ earlier.
Before we go further, search for ‘ChatStorage.sqlite’ in the same folder. You will need this in the next step.
2. Extract & Read WhatsApp Chat History
So far, we have extracted WhatsApp data from our iPhone files. To read the chat history on the computer, we must first extract it from our WhatsApp data.
To extract, first download WhatsApp Xtract. Extract WhatsApp Xtract to a folder which is convenient for you.
You will see a ‘ChatStorage.sqlite’ in the WhatsApp Xtract folder. Replace it with your own ‘ChatStorage.sqlite’ that has been extracted from your backed up file.
To Read on Browser View
Download and install Phyton.
Download the 32bit/x86 version even if you’re running on a 64bit/x64
Windows. If you choose to download the 64bit version, you’ll end up with
an error when you try to use it later on.
After installing Phyton, go back to the WhatsApp Xtract folder and
search for ‘!install pyCrypto.bat’. Run it (or right click and ‘run as
administrator’).
Then, run ‘WhatsApp_xtract_iphone.bat’.
Once it is done, it will open in your browser and all your WhatsApp chat history will be displayed.
Clicking on the ‘Contact Name’ will direct you to the chat history with that contact.
The HTML file will be stored in the WhatsApp Xtract folder, so you can refer back to that for future use.
