Mac users say WhatsApp drag and drop is deleting original files

A bug in WhatsApp Desktop for Mac is causing files to be permanently removed from users’ computers when dragged into a chat. Instead of copying the file, the app is moving it into its own internal temp folder, and for many users, the original is gone for good.

Someone posted about the issue on r/mac about a week ago, where they described the moment of discovery as a horror. Several others piled in quickly, many saying they’d been quietly losing important documents for weeks without knowing why.

According to one commenter, dragged files end up buried in /Users/user/Library/Containers/net.whatsapp.WhatsApp/Data/tmp, which isn’t somewhere most people would ever think to look. Worse, if you delete the message inside WhatsApp, the file is gone entirely. There’s no trash, no undo.

From what I was able to gather, the bug doesn’t hit all file types equally. JPGs, PNGs, and video files appear to behave normally, but PDFs, PowerPoint files, ZIP archives, and text files are the ones getting moved instead of copied. One user said they lost several important PDFs and had to recreate them from scratch before they even figured out what was happening.

Similar complaints are showing up on r/MacOS and r/whatsapp. The Dropbox community forum has also seen a report of the same thing happening with files dragged from a local Dropbox folder, though that turned out to be the same WhatsApp bug, not a Dropbox issue.

A few users tried updating to the newest WhatsApp build, but that didn’t help everyone. One person on r/MacOS confirmed the fix worked for them on version 26.16.15, while others on the exact same version said the bug was still happening. So it’s unclear whether a partial fix has gone out or whether something else is at play.

Holding the Option key while dragging (which normally forces a copy on Mac) also doesn’t seem to work. The file still gets moved anyway.

For now, the only reliable workaround is to use the + button inside WhatsApp to attach files the old-fashioned way. Not ideal, but it keeps your files intact.

Meta hasn’t commented publicly on the issue. We’ll keep an eye on this one. You can find more reports here, here, and here.

Featured image generated with AI

We stand out from the tech-media crowd because we break news stories; we mainly bring you stuff that you won’t find anywhere in the mainstream tech media. Our stories have been picked up by some of the world’s most popular websites and media outlets—more info is available here.