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Comment by whatsupdog | Hacker News Reader

For someone who travels a lot, I would love to have the ability to have WhatsApp on multiple phones (like telegram). I have a separate phone for traveling to US/Canada, which I usually wipe clean before crossing. It's really cumbersome to backup/restore Whatsapp messages from one phone to another. Or I just lose the messages that I send/receive while traveling.

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You can install Whatsapp on up to four or five devices. There one main device, and the rest are "clients", exactly like the desktop apps. But they can send and receive messages even when the main device is offline.

I was under the impression that they all must be on the same wifi.

this isn't the case anymore, now they are independent clients

I don't use WhatsApp so I have no idea what that is like. I have telegram running on two mobile devices and two desktops. There is no "moving messages" or "losing messages", I just install telegram or telegram desktop and all my chats appear with all the messages.

Everybody is on telegram today, it's not like five years ago when people did not know what it was.

Well, Telegram stores all messages without e2ee in the cloud, so barely comparable.

Matrix gives a similar experience with e2ee though, but you have to save a recovery key for the case you lose access to all your sessions

What do you put on the cleaned phone?

Entering/Leaving is the biggest problem with US travel and hardware. In the time inbetween you can just use it like a normal phone.

I have all my data and passwords etc., mostly on nextcloud at my home. After crossing the border I login into whatever accounts I need to and download whatever files I need. When it's time to cross again, I do a factory reset.

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