WhatsBackUpv1.2.1

Last revised 17 August 2026

Where your data goes.

Onto your own disk, and nowhere else — unless you switch on one specific feature, in which case the app shows you exactly what it would send before it sends it.

§ 01 The shape of it

There is no service behind this

Nothing to sign up for
No account. No server we operate. No analytics, no crash reporting, no usage statistics, no licence check, no phoning home. The app talks to WhatsApp Web and to nothing else of ours — because there is nothing of ours to talk to.
Your files are just files
Photographs and videos land in folders you choose, as ordinary JPGs and MP4s. Message text goes into a standard SQLite database on the same disk. Nothing is sealed into a format only we can read, and nothing stops working if this project does.

What it keeps on your PC

  • Photographs and videos from your chats, in the folders you picked during setup.
  • Message text, sender, timestamp and chat name, in a local SQLite database.
  • The WhatsApp link itself — a browser profile that is your linked-device session. Treat it like a password: anyone with that folder and the app could read your messages.
  • Your settings, and a rotating log capped at a size you set.
  • If sorting is on: the labels and album names it produced, in the same database.

All of it under %LOCALAPPDATA%\WhatsBackUp\ unless you chose elsewhere for your media. Uninstalling leaves every bit of it in place.

§ 02 The exception

The one thing that can leave your PC

AI sorting is the only feature that sends anything anywhere, and it is switched off until you deliberately turn it on.

When you enable it, WhatsBackUp sends your photographs and a sample of your message text to the AI provider you choose, using your own API key. There is no intermediary: the request goes from your PC to that provider directly.

Before the very first call the app prints the literal payload it would send — one photograph and one chat, exactly as they would appear in the request — and you have to accept it. You can look again whenever you like from ⚙︎ Settings → AI sorting → Show me exactly what leaves my PC.

What is actually sent

  • For a photograph: the image itself, the name of the chat it came from, whether you sent or received it, and its caption if it had one.
  • For a conversation: the chat name and a sample of the text — the 30 most recent messages plus 30 spread across its history, trimmed to 200 characters each. Not the whole conversation.
  • Never sent: your API key to anyone but the provider you configured, your media to us, or anything at all while the feature is off.

Or keep it entirely on your machine

Choose Ollama or LM Studio and the model runs on your own PC. Nothing crosses the internet, no key is needed, and it costs nothing — the app will not even send an authorisation header to a local model, because there is no secret it needs. There is also a Demo mode that invents plausible labels locally, so you can see what sorting looks like with no provider at all.

Your API key

Encrypted with Windows' own data protection (DPAPI) and stored as ciphertext. It is never written to the settings file in readable form, never appears in the log, and is deliberately stripped from the diagnostic report you might copy and email when asking for help. It is decrypted in memory only to make a request to the provider you chose — and only ever sent to the address you saved.

§ 03 Other people

The part most backup tools skip

WhatsBackUp archives media from everyone you chat with, and none of them agreed to that. Their photographs, their voice notes if you enable them, their words.

Keeping a personal copy of messages sent to you is lawful in most places, but that changes when you republish them, or when you hold other people's personal data in a business context — the GDPR and its equivalents apply to you, not to us. Keep the copies to yourself, delete what you shouldn't be keeping, and use the per-chat exclusions in settings for conversations that should never be archived at all.

Removing everything

  • Labels and albums: ⚙︎ Settings → AI sorting → Delete all AI labels and albums.
  • The WhatsApp link: ⚙︎ Settings → Connection → Unlink, then remove the device from your phone's Linked devices list.
  • Everything else: uninstall, then delete %LOCALAPPDATA%\WhatsBackUp\ and your media folder. Nothing is left anywhere else, because there is nowhere else.

If this page ever changes

If the app ever starts sending something it does not send today, this page changes and so does the notice inside the app — before the feature ships, not after. The wording here is kept deliberately in step with the consent screen you actually see.

  1. This is not an official WhatsApp app. It connects the way WhatsApp Web does, through an open-source library WhatsApp does not endorse. Their terms do not permit unofficial clients, and there is a real if small chance an account gets limited or banned for using one.
  2. No warranty. This is free software provided as is. You are responsible for how you use it, including other people's privacy and the law where you live.