The new update on WhatsApp bring a very crucial functionality to the app which has probably been wanted by a lot of users. Previously if a user deleted media files from their device it was impossible for them to re-download it or retrieve it. Now with the new update, the media which will be sent over WhatsApp will be not be instantly deleted from the WhatsApp servers and instead will be kept over there for a period of 30 days. Whereas, downloaded media will disappear immediately. This report comes from the popular WhatsApp blog WABetaInfo which furnished information about the same and also outlined that this new feature will be eligible for every media format including images, videos, GIFs, voice messages and documents. The versions of WhatsApp which are currently shipping this update are 2.18.106 and 2.18.110.

During testing of this feature, WABetaInfo discovered that it was possible to recover deleted files of up to months. The app, however, can download media for the messages dating back to almost a year. Instead, the application asks users to request the sender to send the file again.

Moreover, this doesn’t mean you can download all the media files. Only those messages that are still present in the chat log will be downloadable again. With the message deleted from the chat, the data is gone. In addition, WABetaInfo indicates even though the deleted files are saved on the servers, they still come with end-to-end encryption. The feature is quite useful as often we accidentally delete some important files.

The delete feature is also exclusive to Android beta version of the app. The feature isn’t available for iOS platform as it is unlikely that users will delete anything from internal file directory without access.

Besides this exciting feature, the company has also released a fix for the timestamp issue with the beta users. Due to a mysterious bug, the timestamp on the chat window of users appeared in a number. The bug altered the timestamp on WhatsApp messaging by replacing the first two alphabets with ASCI codes.