Key Highlights
- WhatsApp backups on Android will soon start counting toward your Google Account cloud storage limit.
- Google offers 15GB of free storage to all Google Accounts.
- The changes have been implemented in the Beta version of the app.
If you have been using WhatsApp’s beta version for Android then your chat backup has begun taking up space in Google Drive. Soon this change will be implemented for all the users in the future update.
Chat backups have begun taking up storage space for Android users of the WhatsApp beta, regardless of whether they are using Google’s cloud storage service at no cost or for a fee.
Google last year announced that it would put an end to the free WhatsApp storage backups on Google Drive. WhatsApp users either have to manually store their chat history on their Android device or have to pay for additional storage in Google Drive.
WhatsApp beta for Android users has already started to see how much storage space is backed up in their Google account. In its announcement Google last year noted that the upcoming change will first start rolling out to WhatsApp Beta users starting in December 2023, then gradually to all WhatsApp users on Android starting in early 2024.
Note that all Google accounts come with a meagre 15GB of free cloud storage. However, eventually, this amount of storage won’t be sufficient to hold all of your smartphone’s data because WhatsApp chats and media backups eat up space on Google accounts.
However, as long as there is space in your Google Account storage you will be able to backup WhatsApp storage or have to remove things you don’t need to free up space on your storage so that backups may continue. Users can also delete items directly from WhatsApp. Keep in mind that removing items from WhatsApp also removes them from your cloud storage, which lowers the amount of space needed for your subsequent backup.
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If you choose to enable WhatsApp backups on Android, personal Google Accounts come with 15GB of storage at no charge – 3X more than most mobile platforms – that’s shared across Google Drive, Gmail, and Google Photos.
According to WhatsApp, it will start notifying users 30 days before this change happens with a banner in WhatsApp Settings > Chats > Chat backup. Also one can still transfer your chats between Android devices using WhatsApp Chat Transfer if you don’t want to back up chats to your Google Account.
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When your account storage is full, you will see the following message:
“Back up your chats and media to your Google account’s storage. You can restore them on a new phone after you download WhatsApp on it.”
