Recently, Google has been… we would say, a bit stingy when it comes to distributing free storage space. The company stopped offering unlimited backups for Photos, in an effort to make users pay for Google One packages if their needs exceed the 15 GB offered for free for each account. Now, it may move on to another change. Currently, Drive does not count WhatsApp backups towards your storage limit, but based on information that surfaced recently, Google may soon impose limits on the amount of material you can store for free in the cloud.
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A few months ago, an option was revealed to be in development that, once it went live, would allow users to manage the size of their backups by deciding which parts of their WhatsApp chat history they wanted to upload to the cloud. At the time, it was speculated that this was in preparation for the removal, or at least a limitation, of free Drive storage for WhatsApp backups. It looks like this is finally coming to fruition. WABetaInfo found some strange strings while analyzing the latest beta of WhatsApp, and it's not good news for those of you with large backups.
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Some of these strings reveal how the app will communicate the news of the free storage limit and detailed notifications that inform you when the free space is about to fill up and when you have reached your limit. According to previous details, this free tier may be limited to 2 GB after which you will continue to be able to upload your chats to Google Drive, but it will start counting against your storage limit.
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2 GB is satisfactory if you don't back up very old photos and videos.
Information source: androidpolice.com
