According to an announcement from Google and WhatsApp, WhatsApp chats and media backups on Android will count toward your Google Account cloud storage limit as of December 2023. This includes the 15GB of free storage from Google Drive.
Starting in December, any photos, videos or audio files WhatsApp saves to your Google Drive backups will reduce the amount of free storage space available. Right now, WhatsApp backups do not count against the 15GB limit.
This change will happen slowly at first, with WhatsApp beta users seeing it in December. Then all Android WhatsApp users will get it in early 2024. A message will appear 30 days before to let you know.
If your Google Drive fills up, you won’t be able to back up your WhatsApp chats anymore. To fix this, you need to delete unused files to make space. Google offers easy ways to find and trash old photos taking up storage. You could also delete old WhatsApp messages to reduce the backup size.
Another option is Google One, Google’s paid storage plan. The cheapest tier gives you 100GB for $1.99 a month. Google may offer some WhatsApp users short-term discounts to help with the change.
This only affects personal Google Accounts, not storage from work or school accounts linked to Google Workspace. Google will keep working with WhatsApp and updating users on the backup situation too. Make sure to check WhatsApp and Google for more details coming soon!
