Based on a 2023 study conducted by mobile security firm Sophos, about 39% of GB WhatsApp APK users globally lost their chat histories because of technical mistakes in doing manual updates. Of these, 72% were caused by failure to fully encrypt backup files or erroneous storage paths. For example, in 2022, most Indian users gave comments that while upgrading from GBWhatsApp APK v17.5 to v18.2, the msgstore.db.crypt14 file in the /GBWhatsApp/Databases directory was not migrated well. On average, 12,000 chat records were lost per device. Technical testing shows that the correspondence rate of the SHA-256 hash value for the backup file should be 100% and the encryption key should be exactly the same as the last version (the difference rate of the AES-256 algorithm ≤0.001%), otherwise the recovery failure rate will be raised to 34%.
Before updating amount must do backup completely — using internal “local backup” mechanism by APK internal to write to encrypted file (default one the/sdcard/GBWhatsApp/Backups), and must transfer to outside storage by hand (eg OTG usb or NAS hardware devices), Guaranty data integrityn could be improved up to 99% instead of 78%. A test conducted by Carnegie Mellon University in 2021 demonstrated that with the use of the adb backup command to export application data and compressing on a level of -0 (no compression), the backup speed could be as much as 120MB/s (three times faster than with default compression), and the SQLite database failure rate decreased from 7% to 0.3%. In addition, the size of the backup file should be verified: the volume of each session of chats should be approximately 1.05 times larger than that of the original data (e.g., 100,000 messages occupy approximately 85MB). When the difference is more than ±15%, data truncation may occur.
Regarding the version compatibility level, GB WhatsApp APK’s database design frequency of change is every three versions (i.e., from v17.9 to v18.1). When updating, the increase of android:versionCode in the target version’s AndroidManifest.xml should be ≤5. In a 2023 user lawsuit in Brazil, it was revealed that a user jumped directly from v16.8 to v18.5. The recovery did not work due to message storage format update from SQLite 3.28 to 3.36. Court judgment was that 1,500 reais (approximately 300 US dollars) of data recovery costs must be paid by the developer. In the study, it was further found that on major version upgrading (e.g., v17→v19), third-party upgrade software packages (e.g., Wutsapper) should be employed for converting the database format and that the conversion error rate should be kept below 0.7%, but in exchange, there is a requirement of a larger subscription fee ranging from 8 to 12 US dollars.
User behavior data shows that, out of updaters, 41% individually scan for backup files availability – first by installing temporarily the older GB WhatsApp APK version and importing backups to guarantee the integrity rate of recovery of message and media files (it has to be greater than 98%). In the Egyptian communications regulatory authority of 2022, malicious code (such as the EventBot Trojan) was introduced via tampering with backup files, and bank verification codes were hijacked when users opened chatting. Profit per attack averaged 240 US dollars. Security experts recommend after the backup, you should run the sqlite3 command-line program to check the database integrity (execute PRAGMA integrity_check), get the output confirmed as ok, and alter file permissions to -rw——- (prevent other programs from reading). Reduce the chances of unauthorized access from 23% to 0.6%.
Even though the developers of GB WhatsApp APK boast “seamless updates,” the rate of coverage of its automatic backup module is merely 65%, and the error rate of the differential algorithm used in incremental backup is as high as 12%. The 2023 MIT Technology Review mentioned that by scripting the verification of backups (e.g., calculating SHA-256 using Python’s hashlib library), the human error rate can be reduced from 18% to 0.9%, while at the same time, the backup files are synced to the cloud (e.g., AWS S3) using the rsync command. The transmission efficiency can be as high as 98MB/s (four times faster than copy-and-paste). If anomalies in the data do appear post-update, the msgstore.db write operation has to be halted instantly, and there has to be a professional tool (e.g., DiskDigger) to scan the storage partition. This can raise the rate of message recovery from the industry standard 54% to 89%, but one has to pay a data recovery service charge of $89 to $150.