Backups of Android WhatsApp chats will no longer be free

WhatsApp is one of the most famous messaging apps, used by several million users. It is used for personal as well as business purposes. The app has several useful features that make the chatting experience more seamless. One such feature is chat backup. It is extremely important in scenarios where users want to access some important files or conversations.

The process of installing WhatsApp on a newly purchased Android phone is simple. Simply sign in and consent to transfer your cloud backup to your new device, and all of your media, chats, and other content will begin to download. As compared to other platforms, the backup on WhatsApp is free.

Well, we have some bad news for you. The company is going to end support for free backups. From December 2023 onwards, there will be no free backups on WhatsApp. We now know that WhatsApp chat backups will begin to be deducted from your Google account storage limit, according to a recent notification from Google.

Non-subscribers of Google One get 15GB of free data that comprises data from Google Photos, Gmail, and other Google apps.  It is now necessary for you to provide your chat backups. Your backup could be extremely large, depending on how long you’ve used WhatsApp and how much media you’ve shared there.

If your backup is large you can do one of the three things. First and foremost skip the chat backup. Secondly, limit the amount of data for backup or simply go for a paid cloud storage service to back up all of your data. If you choose that path, disabling cloud backups is simple. Just navigate to Settings > Chats > Chat Backup and set the Backup to Google Drive setting to “Never”. However, doing so will result in the loss of all of your data in the event that you misplace or damage your current phone.

Limiting your data is time-consuming since you will be required to check each chat and media file in detail. On the other hand, you have the option to subscribe to Google storage solutions. The basic plan starts at $1.99 per month, which gives access to 100GB of data. It should be more than enough for a WhatsApp chat backup.