TL;DR: WhatsApp Google Drive backup (~12 GB) was working fine until earlier this week, but now fails to restore on both my old Android phone and my new Nothing Phone 3, even after SIM swap, reinstall, and factory reset.
WhatsApp chat history restore issue when switching to Nothing Phone 3 (Android to Android)
I recently bought a Nothing Phone 3 and am unable to restore my WhatsApp chat history from Google Drive. The restore now fails consistently on both devices, even though backups were working normally until earlier this week (before attempting the phone migration).**
Steps taken:**
Initially, I did not move my SIM to the new phone. I installed WhatsApp on the Nothing Phone 3 and, when prompted, entered my phone number (the SIM was still in my old phone) to begin verification.
During setup, WhatsApp detected the Google Drive backup and showed restore progress from 0% to 100%, but then failed with an error saying “Unable to restore messages.”
I then moved the SIM to the new phone, uninstalled WhatsApp from both phones, reinstalled it on the new phone, and attempted the restore again — same error.
I performed a factory reset on the new phone and repeated the process — no change.
To rule out device-specific issues, I reinstalled WhatsApp on my old phone (Mi 10T Lite) and attempted to restore the same Google Drive backup — the restore failed with the same error.
Google Drive still shows the correct WhatsApp backup:
Both phones are Android (old phone: Mi 10T Lite, new phone: Nothing Phone 3).
I have already contacted WhatsApp Support and posted in a Google community forum, but haven’t received a resolution yet.
Has anyone encountered a similar issue or knows what might have caused a previously working backup to suddenly fail? Any suggestions or recovery options would be greatly appreciated.
