Here’s why you need to backup your WhatsApp data to Google Drive now

With roughly 1.5 billion people using WhatsApp every month as of July 2018, the Facebook-owned instant messaging platform is kind of its realm, ahead of the likes of Telegram, Viber and Facebook’s own Messenger. WhatsApp allows users to easily switch between devices and maintain their chats, media and other items by harnessing a backup feature. This leverages the power of Google Drive’s storage to keep user data safely secured in the cloud.

Data backed up by WhatsApp can quickly run high as many people use the platform to share lots and lots of videos and photos. These items stored by WhatsApp in a user’s Google Drive counted towards their storage tally. But that is set to change. WhatsApp has reached an agreement with Google to no longer count backups against Google Drive storage quotas, starting November 12, 2018.

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However, there’s the catch, as mentioned in this mail from Google to XDA. The email announcing this agreement was sent out to users earlier yesterday, as confirmed XDA’s Steven Zimmerman.

This means if users do not fully ensure all of their data, both past and present, is backed up to Google Drive before November 12 they could lose any photos, chat history, video and other media after such time.

 


Related: How to backup and restore your phone contacts on Android


Why you should probably backup right now.

As stated in the mail, the users are adviced to back-up their WhatsApp data to Google Drive before 12th November. This means if users do not fully ensure all of their data, both past and present, is backed up to Google Drive before November 12 they could lose any photos, chat history, video and other media after such time.

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“However, any WhatsApp backups that have not been updated in more than a year will automatically be removed from storage.

“This policy will come into effect for all users on November 12, 2018, although some users may see the quota benefits earlier.

“To avoid the loss of backups, we recommend that people back up WhatsApp before November 12, 2018.”

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