Since November 2018, WhatsApp users on Android were able to back up their chat data to Google Drive without affecting their storage space limit. However, that might change soon as a report by WABetaInfo claims that Google may make a U-turn on that policy.
According to a set of codes found by the website, WhatsApp plans to notify users when their Google Drive storage is almost full, meaning that backups will eventually be counted against the storage. The codes suggest that there will still be a certain free quota for WhatsApp backup, but it will be limited.
While disappointing, the U-turn didn’t come as a surprise to us considering that Google stopped offering unlimited storage for Google Photos last year. A few months ago, WABetaInfo has also discovered that WhatsApp is working on letting users choose the type of data to back up on Google Drive, which now has a clearer explanation as to why such a feature would be needed for an unlimited cloud plan.
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Since WhatsApp and Google have yet to make any official comments regarding the discovery by WABetaInfo, we don’t know for sure if the U-turn is really going to happen. In case you want to prepare for it though, the most affordable paid Google Drive plan is currently available at RM8.49 per month for 100GB.
On a related note, the data crunch is something that WhatsApp users on iOS have experienced for the longest time. Furthermore, not only that the free iCloud storage limit is much lower than Google Drive at just 5GB but users also need to have at least 2.05 times the space available in their iCloud drive than the actual size of the backup in order to store their WhatsApp data there.
(Source: WABetaInfo.)
