Ever wanted to have a local copy of all your whatsapp conversation but you are unsure how to get about? In this tutorial, I’ll be showing you how to get a decrypted whatsapp database onto your computer. This tutorial is meant for educational purposes.
Contents
Requirements
Your phone must be above Android 4.0 & is rooted first for this to work. If not, google search on “how to root + [your phone name/model]” Please understand what is rooting & its risk before you start rooting your phone.
Overview
Basically, the whatsapp messages database is encrypted, so in order to view them, we first have to decrypt the message database before using an application to view the messages, conversations. To do that, we have to get the database encryption key, which is used to encrypt and decrypt the messages database. In other words, imagine the messages database as a box full of letters locked with a padlock. With the key, you can either lock the box or unlock the box. So basically, we need a rooted phone to retrieve the ‘key’.
Steps
1) Download adbd Insecure here. This will allow the computer to retrieve the ‘key’ from your android device. Open the application and check the “Enable insecure adbd” option.
2) Next, enable developers option and USB debugging in your android device settings.
3) Download the Key retriever Download. This is the script which will retrieve the ‘key’. Extract the zip file & open it. Double-click on “run.bat”. Follow the instructions on the command prompt. When the key is extracted, the command prompt will display “Done!”.
4) Copy the msgstore.db.crypt8 (Located at sdcard>WhatsApp>Databases) to your desktop.
5) To view the database, with have to download a viewer. Download the WhatsApp viewer here: https://github.com/andreas-mausch/whatsapp-viewer/releases/tag/v1.8. Extract the zip file to your desktop & run the program. Click File>Decrypt .crypt8… and select your key & database location. Your key location would be located in the extracted Key retriever folder. If everything goes to plan, a dialog box should appear saying “Database decrypted to file msgstore.decrypted.db”.
6) Next, click on File>Open. The file location of msgstore.decrypted.db should be located at the the extracted Key Retriever folder & click OK. Your conversations and messages should be loaded into the table of the viewer.