Retrieving Messages Issue

Hello everyone.

We can't get around this vicious circle of messages. My wife has a Galaxy S5 and I got her an S8 so we went to Cricket to have the entire S5 cloned the over to the S8. Everything went over fine, everything but her Whats App messages that is.

When we tried to get them over, we got the message about being connected to the internet (we ARE connected!) and then if we hit Skip Restore, the next message pops up about not being able to restore later. I cleaned the Cache out, but still got those warnings. She is signed in to the same Google account where her messages are, she just can't download them onto the S8.

Someone suggested deleting Whats App and reinstalling it, but I don't want to take a chance of losing her messages forever; if in fact that's what will happen. Should we do that? Or maybe turn off WiFi and just use our normal LTE connection and see what happens? Or?