If you’ve managed to keep your WhatsApp history intact for years, you may have an overwhelming number of conversations open in the Chats tab. A good way to do a Marie Condo cleaning , but without throwing anything away regardless of whether it makes you happy or not is by archiving conversations .
WhatsApp allows us to archive chats to remove them from the middle without deleting them . It works in a similar way to archiving in other apps and social networks, such as Instagram , although finding the button in question may not be as intuitive as we would like, especially for those who have never done it before.
How to archive WhatsApp messages
WhatsApp keeps all the conversations we have open in the chat tab, but maybe you don’t want to keep the 2012 chat with your cousin there. A half solution to delete it and keep it is to archive it : it is still on WhatsApp, but hidden.
When a conversation is archived, it’s still accessible from the Archived folder at the top, but it doesn’t show up among chats. Archiving a chat is very easy, if you know where the specific button is and the best thing is that at any time you can regret it and recover it .
WhatsApp chats are archived directly from the conversations view, that is, not from within the specific chat. These are the specific steps to archive a WhatsApp chat:
- Enter the WhatsApp Chats tab.
- Locate the conversation you want to archive and long-tap on it until the selection mode opens.
- Press the box button with a down arrow (archive).
- This will archive the message. You can regret it for a few seconds by pressing If you do not press it in time and want to unarchive the chat, we will tell you how to do it below.
How to unarchive WhatsApp messages
As soon as you archive your first WhatsApp message, you will see at the top, in the Chats tab, a folder called Archived . By tapping on it, you can go back to those conversations that you have archived, access the conversations, see if they have new messages and reply to them, as always.
You don’t need to unarchive a chat to reply , but if you want to unarchive a chat, the process is just as easy for archiving. You must make a long touch on the conversation and, once it is selected, press the box button with an up arrow (unarchive).
This will return the chat to the WhatsApp Chats tab and it will be placed in its corresponding place, based on the date of the last message of said conversation. Here are the simple steps to recover an archived WhatsApp chat :
- In WhatsApp, go to the Chats tab.
- Tap on Filedat the top.
- Make a long touch on the conversation you want to recover.
- Press the box button with an up arrow (unarchive).
Prevent archived chats from being unarchived
When you get a new response to a chat that you have archived on WhatsApp, two things may happen: it will be automatically unarchived or it will remain archived, but it will indicate the number of unread messages as a number next to Archived .
This is so because WhatsApp has the option to keep, or not, the archived chats , despite the fact that they receive new messages. In the past, the chats we archived were always unarchived when they received a new response, but today this does not have to be the case.
If you want what happens in WhatsApp archived chats to stay in archived chats, then you need to turn on Keep archived chats in WhatsApp Chat settings. It is done like this:
- In WhatsApp, tap the menu button ⋮
- Tap on
- Enter
- Turn on Keep chats archived.
