My phone Melted (story below) and I have a replacement. I want my contacts, photos, and WhatsApp messages back. I presume I have some form of backup in my otherwise defunct gmail account. Is there any way I can examine what's there before loading it into the phone?

Phone Melted Story:
There I was at a zoom meeting when smoke started coming in front of my nose, getting worse by the second. The only possible source was my phone, so I put it on the mouse mat, and yes it was smoking, and I was lucky not to be severely damaged.

It started smoking so much I had to put it on the window sill, as the screen had burned the mouse mat. I scored high marks for getting the phone away from my person, but very low marks for keeping smoke out of the house, and am still in the dog house over that. My son went looking for my Sim, and found the Sim holder, but no sim. It must have melted too.

There have been many cases of phone and laptop battery fires causing issues. How old was your phone?

My Samsung died about a year ago. When I set up my new Pixel 4A it synced everything as soon as I logged into Google. I didn't get a chance to edit anything but I assume you can see anything Google has by logging in from a computer. WhatsApp is Facebook, so I assume there is no way to delete anything.

You can login to google from a computer web browser. Contacts and photos are there. Not famililar with whatsapp but dont think thats a google service so unlikely backed up to google, but if it is, then it'll be there on pc too.

enigma9o7, as noted in post #2, Whatsapp is Facebook, not Google.

The process will probably be the same as business_kid did back in August.

Nothing gets backed up unless you activate it - or maybe don't deactivate it considering googles' appetite for keeping everything for their marketing efforts.
I manually handle photos, but let google do their worst for for contacts, schedule. No experience of facebook.

Thanks for replies. Last August I did a master reset and took what was there on the same phone. This is a different older phone.I wasn't very happy with it last August - hence the question. I've no real experience of Facebook either - just enough to stay well away from it. Ditto for Twitter.

Actually, as things worked out, one solution was to install WhatsApp. It turns our Facebook is as greedy for personal data as Google. By installing WhatsApp, I got

• Every contact with and without a Whatsapp account.
• All associated media including stuff I'd deleted years ago.
• All WhatsApp history.

The last backup date (which I saw somewhere) was 21st October, but all the stuff I examined seems more recent. So I'm back to the usual drag of fiddling with an unfamiliar phone and downloading this, that & the other until some semblance of normality returns. I haven't checked the media thoroughly, but I probably have the (few)personal photos & videos also.

My new phone is a 2nd hand Samsung A10 - a cheapo phone, which suits me just fine, as I dinn't use half of the melted one's giommicks.