Unlimited space of WhatsApp backups on Google Drive disappears

If you use WhatsApp on Android, backups are placed on Google Drive. The advantage is that there is a collaboration between Google and WhatsApp, so it does not cost you Google Drive space. However, that is coming to an end. Google is going to limit the ‘free’ WhatsApp backups on Google Drive.

WhatsApp backups

At the moment it has not yet been started, so you can still backup your WhatsApp conversations to Google Drive with peace of mind. It is also not yet known when Google would set a limit on this and how high that limit is. The folks at WABetaInfo discovered that Google is planning to do this when it stumbled upon a new opportunity months ago.

That option was to be able to choose which type of messages would not be saved in Google Drive, so that you save space on your Google Drive. That’s crazy, of course: why would you want to save space on your Google Drive, if WhatsApp backups don’t take up space on Google Drive at all? That can only mean one thing, the website concludes. Google wants to limit when it comes to Google Drive backups in the future.

Google Drive

Now the folks at WABetaInfo are not slow to understand: they were just waiting for real evidence instead of this rumor. In a screenshot it shows code from which you can see that changes are coming for backups (Google Drive backup changing), notifications for when Google Drive is almost full when the limit is reached and also when the limit starts.

The latter in particular shows that it is not the case that everyone will suddenly use Google Drive space with backups of WhatsApp, but that there will indeed be a maximum on the ‘free’ space.

If it’s true, then it’s a shame Google chose to do this, as it basically gave it an advantage over Apple, which uses iCloud storage for WhatsApp backups.

Do you use the backup function for WhatsApp? Leave it below.