Finding and exporting your WhatsApp Business data

What it holds

WhatsApp Business contains customer conversations, exchanged media and account-level business information. The phone app and API-connected inboxes store history in different places, so records may also sit with a messaging provider or CRM.

Where WhatsApp Business shows the size

1. Work out which product is in use: the app on a phone, or the Cloud API connected to your own software or a provider.
2. For the app, export a handful of busy customer chats, count their messages and scale up by the number of chats on the phone.
3. For the Cloud API, count the stored messages in the database, CRM or inbox tool that receives them. Meta keeps no history you can look up later.

Plan and admin role. For the app, the phone that holds the business account. For the Cloud API, access to wherever your company or provider stores the messages.

Exporting the full history

1. In the app, open a chat, use the chat menu to export it with or without media, and send the file to storage you control.
2. Repeat for every chat in scope.
3. For Cloud API history, export from your own message store or your provider's export tool.

Phone backups to Google or iCloud copy every chat, but they are meant for restoring a phone and may be encrypted, so they don't work as a readable export.

Meta keeps Cloud API messages for no more than 30 days, mainly for retries. Plan around your own copies.

You don't need to run an export to talk to us, and there's no need to clean it first — removing personal data is part of our work.