Reportedly, WhatsApp is working on a new feature, which lets users control and manage the size of their chat backups. It is touted to be one of the biggest problems faced by users and the solution was inflexible. Eventually, many users of the instant messaging platform had to forego their precious memories as they had to delete messages, photos and much more. Notably, this is the second feature related to backup that is likely under development by the instant messaging app.
Recently, it was claimed that WhatsApp has started rolling out the beta testing of end-to-end chat encryption for cloud backups. It is yet to be rolled out to all users widely in the coming weeks.
WhatsApp Chat Backup Size
With the new feature that was spotted by the fansite tracker WABetaInfo, the instant messaging platform appears to be working on a new feature called “Manage backup size”. This feature has been spotted in the Android beta version 2.21.21.7 and it is claimed to let users control the size of their chat backup that is uploaded to the cloud storage.
If you are wondering how this feature will be of help, then you need to understand that WhatsApp backups are heavy and take a lot of space on cloud storage as there will be pictures, videos and other files that have several gigabytes worth of backup data.
As per the screenshot shared by the report, a user should be able to exclude some categories of media from the chat backup such as audio, photos, documents, videos, and other media to reduce the size of the backup. It also speculated that one of the reasons for this new feature is the unlimited storage available on Google Drive for WhatsApp backups could be restricted in the future. This points to the recent limitation of free storage on Google Photos. However, it is not sure about the same as there is no communication regarding the same.
Of late, WhatsApp has been working on several privacy-related features including the ability to hide several parts of the user profile from specific contacts and end-to-end encryption for backups in the cloud. It remains to be seen when the ‘Manage backup size’ feature will be rolled out on WhatsApp.
