If you’re a heavy WhatsApp user and you use it as one of your primary communication platforms, you probably regularly back it up on Google Drive to save and archive messages. But if you’re on a limited storage plan (meaning free) on Google, then the constant backups might be taking up your space. Well the good news is that you will now be able to store it on your Drive and not have it take up any of your actual space.
People on reddit started sharing that they received an email from Google saying that starting this November, their WhatsApp backups won’t count toward your Google Storage anymore. This is apparently part of a new “accord” between Google and WhatsApp’s parent company, which is of course Facebook just in case you didn’t know it yet.
This means that you can back up your WhatsApp as many times as you want and not have to worry about upgrading your Google Storage since it’s not taking up space anyway. Users get 15GB storage free from Google, but that cuts across all products like Gmail, Google Photos, and Google Drive. If you use those three products a lot, that 15GB will be used up easily. So having WhatsApp backup for “free” is a huge thing if you’re on the free storage tier.
However, if you haven’t updated your WhatsApp back up data in more than a year, the file will be automatically removed from your Google Drive storage. So you might want to start backing up your data since it’s practically painless to do so (unless you really don’t want your WhatsApp data stored on Google anyway).
The new policy will take into effect November 12 of this year so better manually backup your WhatsApp before then. In fact, Google recommends manually refreshing existing backups before October 30.
VIA: Reddit
