“As an important heads up, WhatsApp backups on Android will soon start counting toward your Google Account cloud storage limit, similar to how WhatsApp backups are handled on other mobile platforms,” Google announced earlier this week.
When are the changes taking effect?
This change will roll out to Beta users starting December 2023, and will slowly roll out to all WhatsApp Android users across the first half of 2024, WhatsApp said in its blog. The app will inform you 30 days before the change happens with a banner in the settings menu of the Android app.
Will the upcoming changes affect me?
If you are an Android phone user in the habit of making daily backups of your WhatsApp chats, including videos and images, you might soon exceed the 15GB free storage on a Google account. Once you hit your storage limit, you will need to free up space to resume backups, or buy more storage with Google One subscription starting at Rs 130 per month for 100 GB cloud storage.
What are WhatsApp Chat Backups?
They are a way to optionally save your chat history and media files so they can be restored if you lose your phone or switch to a new device. WhatsApp presently only supports cloud-based chat backups, storing them on Google Drive on Android and iCloud on iOS, with end-to-end encryption. Alternatively, you can also export your chats to a file on your computer.
Is it necessary to maintain chat backups?
While backups are optional on WhatsApp, they come handy when you lose your phone or need to restore your chats in a new device. WhatsApp does support transferring chats between Android devices using a proprietary app, cloud backups make it a lot more hassle-free.
