WhatsApp is the world’s most popular messaging service, surpassing that of Facebook Messenger, WeChat and Telegram.
According to Statista, a provider of market and consumer data, roughly 1.5billion people use WhatsApp every month as of July 2018.
This compares to just 1.3billion for Facebook Messenger and 1.04billion for WeChat for the same period.
WhatsApp allows users to easily switch between devices and maintain their chats, media and other items by harnessing a backup feature.
This takes advantage of the power of Google Drive’s storage to keep data in the cloud.
Previously the items stored by WhatsApp in a user’s Google Drive counted towards their storage tally.
However, WhatsApp has reached a “new agreement” with the Silicon Valley giant that means chat backups will no longer subtract from the cloud quota.
Google confirmed the change in an email to XDA Developers.
The deal will “come into effect for all users on November 12, 2018”.
Google is advising users to manually back up their WhatsApp content before the date or risk losing precious files.
The tech giant explained “any WhatsApp backups that have not been updated in more than a year will automatically be removed from storage” once the transition takes place.
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.
In a letter to an XDA Developers reporter, Google said: “Due to a new agreement between WhatsApp and Google, WhatsApp backups will no longer count against Google Drive storage quota.
“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.”
Google Drive offers 15GB of free storage to its users – for an increased amount users can pay a monthly fee.
For WhatsApp fanatics to avoid losing data they should back up their device.
To do this users should launch the app and press the icon shaped like bullet points in the top right-hand corner.
The “settings” button should then be pressed, then “chats”.
Then press “chat backup” where users will be given information on the last time data was uploaded to the cloud.
To launch a backup manually, all users have to do is press the “back up” button.
WhatsApp fanatics also have the option to declare whether they want videos to be included in the backup to Google Drive.
