Since 2018, WhatsApp backups to Google Drive on Android have not counted against your account storage quota. Given WhatsApp’s popularity, this free storage has been useful, especially since Google has kept its free storage tier unchanged at 15GB for years now. This was unlike on the iPhone, where chat backups would count against your iCloud storage. But in November 2023, Meta announced that starting in early 2024,WhatsApp backups would count towards your Drive storage. That time has now finally arrived.
If you are on WhatsApp’s stable channel, you should check your Google account storage. Under the “Other” section, you might find a new WhatsApp backup entry. Tapping on it will open the app’s “Manage Storage” page, where you can see the space occupied by various conversations and files. From here, you can quickly delete large media and documents to reduce the space WhatsApp’s chat backup takes.
The change appears to be slowly rolling out on WhatsApp’s stable channel and is, so far, only showing up for one of my Google accounts. Interestingly,WhatsApp’s support pagesays a banner will appear in your chat backup settings at least 30 days before to notify you of this change. However, I don’t see any such banner in WhatsApp on my phone.
The support page says the change “will roll out slowly to all WhatsApp Android users across the first half of 2024.” So, it appears the roll-out is still in its initial stages and could take a while to complete. Google might also offer promo offers onGoogle Onesubscription plans with additional storage space to ease the transition for users.
If you are on WhatsApp’s beta channel, your chat backups to Drive started counting against your storage quota from December 2023 itself. Given the messaging service’s popularity, its Drive backup will likely take up a few gigabytes of space in your Google account. That could be an issue if you are already close to exhausting the 15GB of account space due toGoogle Photosbackup and Drive files.
Google Workspace users who got their account through work or school are unaffected by this change for now.
Before 2018, WhatsApp backups counted against your Drive’s storage quota. But in November 2018, Google announced that the backups wouldn’t count against your account storage. Signs of both companiesreconsidering their decisionand ending the free space offer first appeared in early 2022 in a WhatsApp beta release.
WhatsApp allows for local transfer of chat backups between devices, so you’re able to turn off Drive backups if you don’t want to pay Google for storage space. But do note that your chats will be stored locally on your device.
