WhatsApp Android Backup Will No Longer Count Towards Google Drive Storage
Google announced yesterday that it’s reached an agreement
with WhatsApp, so the latter’s backups will no longer count towards your Drive
storage limit. In essence, for the foreseeable future, you have free, unlimited
WhatsApp backups for life. This means that if you’re using the free Google
Drive plan with 15GB, you’ll be able to backup your WhatsApp media separately,
without using up your original quota.
This helps Android users to use the available Google Drive
space to store important files and data other than the regular WhatsApp data. The
handset also needs to have enough free space to create the Google Drive backup.
Notably, apart from updating its FAQ page, WhatsApp has started sending emails
to users to inform them about the fresh change.
Google recommends that users should manually backup their
account before the 12th to make sure that no data gets lost when the new
partnership comes into effect. Users can manually backup their WhatsApp data by
going to Settings > Chat > Chat Backup and do a backup of their chats. We
recommend using a WiFi connection while backing up for better speed and
avoiding additional data charges by your internet service provider.
How To BackUp Whatsapp Chats and Datas to Google Drive?
- Open WhatsApp.
- Tap Menu > Settings > Chats > Chat backup.
- Tap Back up to Google Drive and select a backup frequency other than Never.
- Select a Google account that you’ll back up your chat history to. If you don’t have a Google account, tap Add account when prompted and enter your login credentials. Please remember the Google account you’re using for the backup.
- Tap Back up over to choose the network you wish to use for backup. Please note that backing up over a cellular data network might result in additional data charges.
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| Google sent email to all users |
WhatsApp has expanded its partnership with Google to start
offering Android users added benefits to use WhatsApp backups on Google Drive. However, users that haven’t backed up their
WhatsApp to Google Drive at least once in the past year will lose any backup in
the cloud. That means you need to manually trigger a WhatsApp backup right now,
if you’ve turned off the automatic feature.
On Android users have the option of backing up their chats
and media to Google Drive. If one changes their Android phone they can restore
the data when setting up WhatsApp on a new phone. Users can backup all of their
messages and media into Google Drive, but it’s worth noting that once the
content makes its way off of WhatsApp’s platform, it’s no longer protected by
end-to-end encryption. However, the Gmail account needs to be the same, as the
one to which the data was backed up in order for the restoration to be
successful. Not all backups will be stored, though. Google said any packages
that are more than a year old will be automatically removed, meaning if you
have a backup but haven’t restored it, it will get deleted. To avoid any loss
of data, you should do it manually via the app settings and going to Chats from
where you can control what and when is saved remotely.
This option is only for Android users only; the iOS version
of the app uses iCloud instead of Google Drive.
Under it, free users get a 15GB storage limit, with 100GB
available for $1.99 a month, 200GB for $2.99 per month, and 2TB available for
$9.99 a month. If you’ve paid for the storage plan of your choice, odds are
you’re probably fine as far as space goes.
