Beware: WhatsApp is Planning to Delete Your Chat History; Here’s How to Secure Your Old Photos, Messages

WhatsApp and Google have shaken hands on a collaboration of sorts, and the news came out a few days ago. The latest update on this news is that soon WhatsApp chat backups can be free of eating up any of the google storage space you have with you, and instead, the backup space would be ‘free’ for users.

This is expected to get into effect as soon as November 12th 2018, and Google Drive has started informing WhatsApp users via email have informed them of the update. However, there is also a flipside to this development. The fact that with this shift of backed-up chats to free storage, google drive deletes all chats of users that are not backed-up on google drive before November 12th.

So what happens to all the media files and chat backups?

Well, to understand this better, users when they use WhatsApp to chat with other users as well as share photos or videos, can see the data on their phones. For instance, any photo shared or received can be backed-up in smartphone’s photo app. Now, this won’t be affected in any way unless users change their new phone (without any backup) or the phone is damaged or is affected by any unfortunate problems that lead to it not working. In this case, the data might be lost, but on the whole, this backup is very much different to the Google Drive back-up.

Users to have ‘Free’ Google Drive storage for their WhatsApp activity.

Now the main news is that Google Drive will be providing ‘free’ storage for WhatsApp users to store their data from the chat app. To understand this better, think a user has a paid plan with Google Drive to store 50GB of data. Earlier, WhatsApp chats, media and other stuff when backed-up with Google Drive used to consume storage space from the allotted quota, but not any more. Meaning the user with a 50GB plan will have WhatsApp data backed-up on the Drive as well as the entire 50GB to be consumed or used for other storage. This policy will go into effect from November 12th 2018, although there are suggestions that many users might be able to avail this facility way before the expected date.

Google Drive deletes chats that are not refreshed

Alternatively, by providing free storage space for WhatsApp back-ups going forward, Google Drive is also expected to delete chats or back-ups from WhatsApp that are not refreshed onto the Drive. It might sound a little complicated, but it merely says that you need to connect WhatsApp to Google Drive before November 12th to protect previous chats and media files that might not have been backed-up until now on Google Drive. So to be sure your chats data and other media files are protected, connect WhatsApp to Google Drive again (irrespective of if it was connected earlier).

You can do it manually by following the instructions from below –

• Open WhatsApp
• Open Menu and then click on settings.
• Tap on Chats
• Go to Back Up and see the last backup details.
• Choose to Back up the data (again if necessary)

The idea behind this news is to provide users with free data to back-up their chats and media. Google Drive does not want users to worry about how much WhatsApp might consume their allotted storage, while to accommodate the same they need to compromise on relieving off a lot of possibly essential data. However, Google Drive, with this move, want to ensure, that redundant data and other unwanted stuff from the Drive are wiped out, clean. On the other side, this move also ensures that WhatsApp users will if they need their data, back-up their WhatsApp to Google Drive all over again.

The post Beware: WhatsApp is Planning to Delete Your Chat History; Here’s How to Secure Your Old Photos, Messages appeared first on MySmartPrice.

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