Deleted WhatsApp without a backup and lost a cherished group chat and images.

Your Whatsapp data is gone for ever.

Can your wife not save the important media to her photos app, albeit one by one?

Once they are safe you could experiment with changing what ID is signed into her phone but you could do a lot of damage to her data, wallet backups etc.

Did you not have a Whatsapp album automatically set up in Photos, or did you disable that default album?

Lesson learned, social media apps even Messages, is not a safe storage or archive for media, it’s a sharing medium.

MarkDev1 wrote:

I was deleting and reinstalling various apps that had grown giant Docs & Data files on my iPhone 15 (things like Facebook and YouTube) to clean up the storage space. I have stupidly deleted WhatsApp in the process and upon reinstalling have realised the iCloud backup function in the app was not on.

I have searched on my PC for a recent iTunes backup but there is nothing on there either.

Although I can cope with losing individual conversations and 99% of the group chats, one group chat in particular included images and videos of my 2 children from the moments they were born, with media shared by all members of the family, and I’m absolutely gutted to think I can’t see them again (it was around 2.2GB of media).

My wife has the same group chat, so is there any possibility that I sign in to her mobile using my Apple ID, backup her WhatsApp chat to the iCloud in the app, and then restore that specific group onto my iPhone when the Apple ID is back on my phone? Would that work?

Many thanks.

Probably not, but this needs to be address with whatsapp support or look at their help forum for issue with their product.