No more free lunch for WhatsApp Android users as backups will be deducted from storage limit

No more free lunch for WhatsApp Android users as backups will be deducted from storage limit،

If you are an Android user, every night (or week or month, whichever you choose), WhatsApp backs up your chats and media to Google Drive without fail. It’s a simple process, made more convenient by the fact that backups don’t count toward your free Google Drive storage, which is 15GB for everyone. These days are about to end.

Google And WhatsApp have announced that WhatsApp backups will soon start impacting your free cloud storage quota. This means that you can’t continue to be as stupid as you have been about backups, because if you run out of storage, backups will stop. To continue storing your chats and media in the cloud, you will need to delete some items from your Google Drive. You can also consider deleting items from WhatsApp so that they take up as little space as possible. To avoid looking like a spoilsport, Google emphasizes that this is how backups have always been managed on other platforms (Apple iOS) which offer three times less free storage space (5 GB) than Google. Keep in mind that 15 GB of free storage is shared across Google Drive, Google Photos, and Gmail.

WhatsApp Beta users will be the first to benefit from this change next month, while others will be affected by the change early next year.

Google also pointed out that you can still sign up for Google One, the company’s cloud storage subscription service, which starts at $1.99 per month for 100 GB. Google will also offer one-time promotions to make the transition easier.

If you don’t want to store chats on Google Drive, you can use the WhatsApp Chat Transfer feature to move chats and media between Android devices.

WhatsApp will notify users 30 days before the change is implemented with a banner in WhatsApp Settings > Chats > Chat Backup.