WhatsApp will soon be asking users on Android devices to backup their chats using Google Drive.
Earlier, the social media messaging platform provided unlimited storage for chat backups on Android devices. Now, the application will be asking Android users to utilise their own storage space, just like iOS users.
This may be a point of concern for those who have lots of multimedia files in their chats, due to their large size.
Users will have to ensure that their chats are just 15GB as the free storage provided by Google is no more than the aforementioned amount.
Those wishing to backup any more, will have to purchase additional storage through Google One.
Here are some ways you can deal with the change:
1. Delete large files
Before you backup your data, ensure that you have deleted large files from your chats. These files may include photographs, videos and even documents.
You can review and delete these files easily by simply going to your WhatsApp settings and clicking on ‘Storage and Data’. After which, you can click on ‘Manage Storage where you will be able to find all files larger than 5MB.
2. Remove forwarded content
Several users have photographs and videos that may have been forwarded to them.
You can find files that have been forwarded multiple times by going to ‘Manage Storage’ (see above) and clicking on ‘Forwarded Many Times’.
3. Disappearing messages
In order to avoid chats taking more space, you can turn on disappearing messages.
By switching this on in individual chats, they will automatically get deleted after a certain period of time.
4. Delete chats entirely
Aside from the other three things above, you can also find old chats (especially, group chats) and delete them entirely.
You can also go to your archived chats and delete those in order to free up some space.