Facebook-owned messaging platform WhatsApp has established an agreement with Google which will now allow WhatsApp users to store their chat and media backup on Google Drive without it occupying storage on their Google Drive. A letter sent out by Google revealed that from now on, users who back up their WhatsApp chat or media backup on Google Drive wouldn’t have to be worried about WhatsApp backup occupying a large amount of storage in their Drive. In simpler terms, users of WhatsApp will enjoy free backup on Google Drive from now on. A lot of users might point out that backups were free on Google Drive before as well, however, on exhausting a certain limit of storage on Drive, users were asked to pay a monthly subscription fee for Drive which allowed them to use more cloud storage. This facility will be available to WhatsApp users who back up their data on Drive at least once a year.
Who Will Benefit?
For most users, this might not make a difference, since a large chunk of WhatsApp users merely store Kilobytes of chat backup on their Google Drive. However, for WhatsApp fanatics who would rather keep their gigabytes worth of data safely locked away in Google Drive, this new functionality is a reason to rejoice.
Google One Pricing
Google has made this announcement in the run-up to the launch of Google One – a consolidated cloud storage subscription service which will avail all services from Google including Google Drive, Google Photos and Gmail in a packaged format. Google will not be charging any amount for 15GB of storage across all of their Google accounts, whereas 100GB of storage will be charged at $1.99 per month, 200GB at $2.99 per month and 2TB will be charged at $9.99 per month.
Availability of Service
Like we mentioned above, for Google One users who own a large data storage on the cloud, this free service might not be an attractive deal since they won’t suffer from storage problems on their Google Drive. However, for WhatsApp users who would instead back up a large volume of data on the cloud without spending a lot on Google Drive, this new announcement certainly makes sense. However, users should note that this new updated partnership between Google and WhatsApp won’t be seen in effect until November 12, 2018. Therefore it is advised that users back up their data manually well before that date to avoid data loss.
