I got a new Samsung Galaxy S21 FE and transferred most apps from my S9 to it but I came across a problem with Whatsapp. It was a simple mistake on my part but there's not a lot of troubleshooting information about this. Well, there is, it says to make sure you're using the right phone number but I was sure that I was, and it didn't tell me I wasn't. There's also nowhere in Whatsapp that tells you the registered phone number.
Anyway, I tried the Google drive method and had tons of successful backups but that led to messages on the new phone saying it couldn't find the backup. I placed the backup under multiple Google accounts that I could access from the new phone but no backups were found.
Then I tried copying the local backups in the Whatsapp folder to the same location on the new phone after clearing data. Some folks will tell you you need to uninstall and reinstall Whatsapp but clearing data (long-press the icon) is good enough. That looked very promising since it found the backups and asked if I wanted to restore them, but it flashed "0 messages restored" when it was done and carried on like a new user.
In the end, after using the phone's 'real' number up until now, I tried my Google voice number instead and that worked, after all these weeks. Well, I forgot that Whatsapp works with virtual numbers so I never tried it. Wouldn't it be nice if the restore process said something like 'the backup you're trying to restore is from a different number.' As if obscurity is protecting the backups. Like 'if we don't tell the bad guys what's wrong, they'll just give up and go away', not likely.
If you're having troubles restoring your Whatsapp backups, is it possible you could've originally used a number different than the one you're trying to recover with? Something to think about.
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