Re - two problems with my WhatsApp

Hello,

I've had a few problems with WhatsApp recently, which I don't know how to solve. May anyone please help me out? I've also tried looking into many Android and WhatsApp resources but have not seen anyone with the same questions.

i) I'm currently using a small, not too powerful media player running on Android as a sort of 'tablet PC', with a screen, keyboard, mouse and speakers. To begin with, my storage is partitioned into 'internal storage' and 'internal NAND Flash'. There used to be an external SD card although it is now no longer there.

My WhatsApp recently encountered a problem which began when I did something unrelated: when I moved other apps (Skype, Viber etc.) from my internal storage into my SD card (this was the only option there, even though my SD card is not present. So I suspect that the app data have instead been moved into the internal NAND Flash).

I realized that my WhatsApp was about 270MB in size before I began moving these apps. After moving, my device hanged for a while, and after it could work again, I was shocked to find that my WhatsApp had become about 50MB in size, and that my entire chat history has gone missing. As I enter WhatsApp, it says:
'Chatgroup X has been created', 'Chatgroup Y has been created', etc. as if everything was a fresh new beginning. There was no content whatsoever in any of the chatgroups.

Does anyone have a similar experience? Could the data have inadvertently been shifted into some folder within my device?

ii) Subsequently, I tried to restore from a previous WhatsApp backup file but decided to create a backup file to keep the current erased state as record. There were initially 5-6 WhatsApp backup files in my folder.

As soon as I created a current backup, my oldest backup file (about 17MB worth of data), which was the one I intended to restore, went missing. This happened before I finally noticed that somehow the folder containing my WhatsApp backup files will always only contain 5-6 backup files... suggesting that perhaps whenever I create a new backup file, the oldest one will be deleted.

Can anyone tell me if WhatsApp automatically deletes the oldest data backups as soon as new ones are made, so as to maintain a constant number of backup files in the device only? If not, may you please suggest a way for me to retrieve this previous backup?

Any help or advice as to how to move forward will be most appreciated.

Thank you for reading. Please do not hesitate to ask for more details if needed.