Help WhatsApp won't prompt for chat restoration from local backup

[Aquitaine]

Hi everyone.

After switching to a new Galaxy S10 smartphone and a new SIM card, I've tried many times in vain to restore my old WhatsApp chats from a local backup. WhatsApp, when newly installed, never even prompts me to restore chats from a local backup. Details below. I've searched the web and tried solutions in vain. Will I ever be able to view my old WhatsApp conversations? I guess I'll give up on this and re-start all my WhatsApp chats from scratch next week if nobody can help...

What hasn't worked:
In various variations, I have:
(1) uninstalled WhatsApp from my phone
(2) deleted the WhatsApp folder,
(3) restarted my phone,
(4) copied my old WhatsApp backup onto the phone (crucially including ''msgstore.db.crypt12'' from the Whatsapp > Databases sub folder),
(5) re-installed WhatsApp.

However:
(6) Upon starting the newly installed WhatsApp, I can never get it to prompt me to restore old chats from the local backup. Accordingly, ''msgstore.db.crypt12'' or ''msgstore-20yy-mm-dd.1.db.crypt12'' are totally ignored. I always only get prompted to restore a backup from Google Drive, but I never used that on my old phone.

One individual commenting here has claimed that going to ''Settings > Accounts" on one's Android phone and (temporarily) removing one's Google account has solved the problem for him. It doesn't for me. I still only get prompted for chat restoration from Google Drive.

More background info:
Switched from a Samsung Galaxy S4 phone to an S10 last winter. I had to exchange the old micro-SIM card for a nano-SIM card. My phone number stayed the same. On the old phone, I only did local backups for WhatsApp and never used Google Drive. The photo and video files have always been easily retrievable from the ''WhatsApp > Media'' folder I backed up. I just cannot access the chats!

 

[Hadron]

Have you considered putting your nanoSIM into an adapter, putting that into the S4 and doing a cloud backup, then seeing whether that will work?

Unfortunately I've only done a WhatsApp transfer between phones once, 3 years ago, and all I can remember was that it worked without problems. So I don't know any special secrets for this.

 

[Aquitaine]

Many thanks for the suggestion, I hadn't considered this yet. Will try this out.

 

[Aquitaine]

Incredibly, this worked! In part because I had to first construct an adapter for the nanoSIM, in part because I never imagined this might be a device-specific issue, it never occurred to me that there might be a workaround path utilizing the old S4, the new nanoSIM, and Google Drive. To my knowledge, no one else on the web came up with this idea either. I cannot thank you enough.