In this guide, we will show you various methods to fix the issue of being unable to restore the WhatsApp backup on your Galaxy S25 Ultra. The latest flagship from the South Korean conglomerate beholds a slew of intriguing goodies up its sleeves. However, it seems to have been bugged with quite a few infuriating issues as well, right since its inception.
While the notification bug is still yet to be addressed, another concerning one has already made its presence felt. As of now, numerous users have voiced their concern that they are unable to restore the WhatsApp Backup on their Galaxy S25 Ultra. Whenever they are trying to do so, they either get stuck on the Finishing progress bar or are greeted with the following error message: “Unable to restore your chats from this backup”.
The issue seems to be impacting both the chat backup method- from Google Drive as well as device-to-device. With that said, there does exist a nifty workaround that might help you address this bug. So without further ado, let’s check it out.
Fix Cannot Restore WhatsApp Backup on Galaxy S25 Ultra
A Redditor who goes by the name Mysterious-Health304 has shared the following tweak in the WhatsApp subreddit that seems to have spelled out success for a bunch of users. So do give it a try and see if it works out for you or not.
The idea is to zip the old WhatsApp and extract to new phone and temporarily move out the MEDIA folder that has all your photos etc. When it tries to restore then it will hang at 99%. Shutdown and restart the phone (thanks to another Redditor here https://www.reddit.com/user/PraKriPa/). Load WhatsApp and it will detect all your chats. Back out and restore MEDIA folder and restart phone and WhatsApp should have ALL your chats plus all your photos etc.
[S] – Source phone – the phone where you will be transferring whatsapp from
[D] – Destination phone – the phone where you will be transferring WhatsApp to
[S] Go to WhatsApp and create a new local backup (you might need to deselect cloud services first). Do not use encryption. Turn that off in the setting on the same page.
[S] Use a file manager or zip tool (I use rar on play store) navigate to Internal\Android\Media\ and zip the whole folder com.whatsapp
[S] Copy this zip file to a computer
[D] Copy the zip file from your computer to Internal\Android\Media
[D] Install WhatsApp and run it once and exit.
[D] Extract the zip file into the correct location Internal\Android\Media. You should have Internal\Android\Media\com.whatsapp\WhatsApp\..
[D] Temporarily move the following folder out of the correct location eg.
Internal\Android\Media\com.whatsapp\WhatsApp\Mediato
Internal\Android\Media\Media
8. [D] Load WhatsApp and go through the step and it will detect a previous local backup – select to restore. If you don’t see this message and it instead asks about restoring from the cloud then something has gone wrong.
9. [D] Wait until restoring message FINISHING 99% appears. It will hang like this forever and never resolve. After around 2 minutes SHUTDOWN and restart the phone.
10. [D] Load WhatsApp and check if messages have been restored. Media will be missing.
11. [D] back out and restore the MEDIA folder to the correct location. You might need to overwrite or delete the temporary one it has created first.
E.g. Move folder
Internal\Android\Media\Media
to
Internal\Android\Media\com.whatsapp\WhatsApp\Media
12. [D] Restart phone and load WhatsApp and all your chats and media should be restored.
This worked on S25 Ultra.
That’s it. These were the steps to fix the issue of being unable to restore the WhatsApp backup on your Galaxy S25 Ultra. As far as the official stance on this matter is concerned, the developers have yet to acknowledge this issue, let alone give out any ETA for the rollout of a fix. As and when any of these two things happen, we will update this guide accordingly. In the meantime, the aforementioned workarounds are your best bet.
