What happens when Whatsapp chat messages are archived?

@Satya Swaroop Dash • 14 Nov, 2017 Archiving chats is nothing more than a cleaning feature on WhatsApp. You use this when you do not want to delete the conversation entirely but still clean up the landing page. Now archiving chats is useful to hide the chats which are infrequent. You all have that friend or relative to whom you send a message during holidays or vacations. The archive feature helps you ignore that chat until the other side has sent a message or vice versa. Now archiving can only be effectively used for personal chats, when it comes to group chats, muting them is your only option.

In Hike you have a better feature of hiding your chats and that is password protected chats. On the Windows Phone version which I am using all you have to do is tap on the innocuous Hike logo, set a four digit passcode and you can hide chats. This feature keeps hiding your chats when the other side sends a message. This feature would be very welcome on WhatsApp and I do not know what is keeping WhatsApp from implementing such a simple and useful feature.

@Noothan Kumar • 24 Jan, 2020

When you archive a  chat, you are not deleting the conversations but simply hiding it from the normal page. You can archive a chat when you want to hide a conversations that you do not want people to see. Just long press on the chat and on top of all chats will be an inbox like icon and you tap that icon and it archived the chat. To view that chat again you scroll down to the bottom of all your chats and you find it.

@Chebet Sarah • 29 Jan, 2020

Archiving allows you to hide a conversation from your usual chats screen. I use it for organizational purposes. It reduces clutter on my chat screen. The hidden conversation is accessible later whenever you need it. Both group chats and individual chats can be archived which is actually awesome especially for the very dormant groups. This will not delete the chat or back it up in your SD card. Only full chat threads can be archived. A single message cannot be archived. Archiving a chat will not affect your online status (I wish it did). When you receive a new message from an archived conversation, the archive chat will reappear, which is perfect as you won't miss any messages.

@Kaustubh Katdare • 29 Jan, 2020

WhatsApp backs up all the messages to Google Drive and you can easily retrieve them whenever you want. I regularly delete the media from my phone (images and videos) because they seem to occupy most of the space. However, just text won't really occupy much space on the phone. 

@Teja Reddy • 25 Feb, 2020

Yes. Once you archive a chat, it merely hides it from the main view and nothing else. So if you receive new messages in the archived chat, you will be notified about it, and the same conversation thread will reappear in the main list. In other words, it gets unarchived automatically.