WhatsApp claims I have no storage on my phone to restore a backup while I have more than enough space for the backup size required. What do I do?

Hello community,

I used to have storage problems on my phone, and chose to delete WhatsApp since it consumed nearly a whole gigabyte on my phone. I thought that through deleting it and reinstalling, it would get rid of the overload of data and start fresh. However, once I got to the page to restore from a back-up of my messages, I didn't have enough space on my phone. So I did further research into how to free up some space (turned out I had a lot of deleted photos hiding in my phone which should've been totally gone) and managed to get nearly 500 MB free. So I went back to my WhatsApp app, and tried to restore the back-up since it says the size of the back-up is 360 MB. However, it still gives the following error message that it had given me before:

"Sorry, there isn't enough room on you iPhone to restore from your iCloud backup. Make room by deleting existing videos or photos and try again."

I didn't (and still don't) understand why it says there is no room on my phone even though I had about 450 MB free. I have tried switching my phone off and then back on. Still, I get the same message. I have also tried deleting WhatsApp again and re-installing it but still I get the same message, still when I have enough room on my phone. By now, I have already consumed my storage on other apps so I don't have much space left anyway, making the error message reasonable.

I would really appreciate if anyone could just throw me some possible solutions that could solve the problem of WhatsApp not recognizing that I've got enough space for it on my iPhone to restore all my messages. I would like them back because I have some important and nice message threads I would love to have retrieved. Remember, I have already tried switching my phone off and back on and also deleting WhatsApp when I had sufficient storage. Currently I don't have enough storage, which makes sense for the error message to appear, but if anyone gives me a possible solution I will make way for enough storage and try the solution.

Also a weird thing is that at first, I still got notifications of messages people sent me through private chat (so not group chat). I don't know what it exactly means, but hopefully that helps with finding a solution.

If you think that I might as well post this question on a WhatsApp forum, please tell me, because it does indeed seem like it lies on the app and not my phone.

Thank you all anyway for reading and wanting to help.

Shaynidw. 🙂