WhatsApp has ballooned to become a social networking site of over 1.5 billion users and although it is not entirely cloud based like Telegram, you can back up your chats on Google Drive. As you know, Google Drive has a 15GB limit for free tier users and that can fill up quickly if you use it to backup your chats and media files.
This was becoming a problem for active users and now it seems it will be a thing of the past. According to XDA Developers, WhatsApp has reached an agreement with Google where the latter won’t count backups against Google Drive storage quotas. This will start from November 12th of this year.
There is a catch to this excellent bit of news. You will need to back up your texts, photos and videos at least once a year or your backups will be automatically removed from Drive Storage. Google also recommends if you need to refresh any existing backups, you’d need to manually back up your WhatsApp client before October 2018.
This is good news for those WhatsApp users who backup large files from their WhatsApp chats, and these backups can be huge if they contain photos and videos. Storage anxiety is a real thing and could bother those people that might have depleted or were almost nearing the storage limit of their Google Drive space.
Although this is a cool move by WhatsApp and Google, it still doesn’t negate the fact that it feels dated when compared to the likes of Telegram which is entirely cloud based. This is a step in the right direction and it will appease a lot of WhatsApp users out there.
