Note for Americans: here WhatsApp is the de facto communication standard. Literally nobody uses SMS/iMessage/Facebook messenger/signal. And carriers still charge 2 euro for a MMS which completely kills iMessage/RCS (if accidentally send MMS, it’s expensive)
I switched phones and instead of copying manually /Android/data/media/com.whatsapp I used the new feature of pairing via qr code.
Besides that’s a not very well designed feature (you need to start transfer on the old phone before logging in the new phone) because they really want to store unencrypted backups on Google drive, the transfer completed in a short time.
Maybe too fast, I was expecting at least one hour to transfer the 5000 photos 10gb, instead it completed in 20 seconds.
So I told myself, ok photos not transferred, I’ll just do that manually and directly put them in the photo archive on my PC rather than keep them mixed with all the “happy holidays” trash.
I browse the old phone to /Android/data/media/com.whatsapp and… It’s empty. Wiped clean after the “successful” transfer process!
Luckily I had set syncthing (the fork on fdroid, the one on play store doesn’t have access to whole storage) to have a full overnight backup! On my PC I still had all the photos, almost deleted too as I noticed that I didn’t set the “trash can” option
Conclusion: go to download syncthing fork from fdroid and have a safety net from mistakes like this
I’ll never understand the people that have their photo archive linked to a chat app.
Where I live, line is the de facto standard. Soooo many people don’t use any backup and just count on line to manage their pictures. Some dude went viral for losing 10years worth of family pictures when he went from iPhone to android. Line is a shit all that doesn’t do any migration past 14days when changing os.
Just use Google photos and never think about it again? Or use self hosted stuff if you don’t like the cloud. But for the love of God, don’t count on the chat app…
In my case it’s just temporary. Every once in a while I’m supposed to take the phone, delete all the useless shit, archive the photos in the computer. Problem is last time I did that was over a year ago because procrastination