WhatsApp Inc. has reached an agreement with Google to no longer count backups against Google Drive storage quotas, starting November 12, 2018. However, users must back up their messages, photos, and/or videos at least once a year or the backups will be automatically removed from Drive storage. The email announcing this agreement was sent out to users earlier today, as confirmed by our very own Steven Zimmerman.
Email sent to Drive users today confirming the agreement with Google
For those of you who actively use Drive and back up large amounts of WhatsApp data, you'll surely appreciate the extra storage space you'll soon have access to. While some users only back up kilobytes of text data, others may back up hundreds of megabytes or even gigabytes of photos and videos. One of our writers, Arol Wright, backs up 2GBs of WhatsApp data to Google Drive.
This announcement comes as Google opened up the Google One cloud storage subscription service for more users worldwide. Google One is a consolidation of all of Google's subscription services, including Google Drive, Google Photos, and Gmail, and offers the following subscription tiers:
- 15GB – Free for all Google accounts
- 100GB – $1.99 per month
- 200GB – $2.99 per month
- 2TB – $9.99 per month
For those of you who pay for Google One, the extra space that will be made available once WhatsApp data no longer counts against Drive's storage quota won't be that appreciable. But for the majority of users on the free tier, saving hundreds of megabytes or a few gigabytes can make a big difference. As stated in the email and at the beginning of this article, this agreement won't take effect until November 12, 2018, so be sure to manually back up your data before we reach that date so you won't lose any of your data. You can download the latest version of the app from the Google Play Store link below.