Phone migration

General
18

"the folders” means:

  • /home/.appsupport/instance/defaultuser/data/data/com.whatsapp/
  • /home/defaultuser/android_storage/Android/data/com.whatsapp/

I did the following, my new phone currently does not have my SIM and is only connected to wireless:

  1. Installed WhatsApp (used the official apk from their website)
  2. Tried their migration, saw only my groups immediately reverted to my old phone.
  3. Stopped AppSupport on the new phone
  4. ls -l on the folders on the new phone to get the correct UID/GID
  5. mv the folders on the new phone to some backup just in case
  6. rsync -avl from old to new, I did not go directly to the final paths but rather first copied, then moved but I don’t think you have to do that.
  7. chown UID:GID -R with the UIDs/GIDs you found earlier or you can still find from your backup dirs on the folders on the new phone note: the UID/GID pair is different for each folder
  8. Started WhatsApp on the new phone and was greeted with the same state as on my old phone.
  9. Stopped AppSupport on both phones to finish migration and not lose data if I end up having to revert to the old phone due to other things (as they are currently in identical state).

Addendum - note that if the rsync takes a long time and your AppSupport/Whatsapp is still running on the source phone you should run it a second time to catch all changes that happened for the duration of the run.

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