Since a deal with Google five years ago, backups of WhatsApp conversations no longer took up storage space on Drive. That will change now.

In 2018, WhatsApp and Google agreed that backups of conversations in the communications app would no longer take up storage space on Google Drive. The digital catch was that your content was no longer encrypted. Five years later, however, the situation is changing: soon WhatsApp backups via Android will cost storage space in Drive.

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The new measure will come into force from December, but not everywhere at the same time. Meta will initially be rolled out to beta users and next year the company will roll out the new situation to WhatsApp users via Android. This way of working already applies to other mobile platforms.

You will receive thirty days notice via a banner in your settings. To do this you need to go to these settings Chats and then to Backup chats. From then on, when you reach your 15GB storage limit on Drive, you will need to select and free up storage space.

Instead of a backup, you can still transfer your conversations between two Android devices. However, this applies to those running Android 6 or later.