Save Your WhatsApp Chat History and Media to Google Drive

Indeed, there are a few 900 million of you out there, many of which are using Android as the mobile platform of choice. They recently added the WhatsApp Web feature which has been around for a while on Telegram and other messaging apps.

As to why did WhatsApp chose Google Drive to store those files, apparently it has to do with the fact that the vast majority of their users are on an Android phone rather than iOS, so this service is better integrated for the Android operating system. If your phone ever got lost or stolen and you didn’t have a backup stored elsewhere, your entire chat history would be gone forever. This new feature offers a seamless way to back up your data in the cloud with encryption for added security.

When the update does hit, you can decide to backup your data daily, weekly, monthly or not at all. “And every month, almost a billion people use WhatsApp to do just that”, says Google in a blog post.

After that, you can choose to manually force an upload of your chats and media, which may take a couple of hours, depending on the size of your backup and the speed of your internet connection. As for iOS users, given that iOS relies on iCloud, there does not seem to be any plans to include Google Drive backup for the iOS version of WhatsApp for now. Not only on their existing phone, but also on a new one too.

If you’re not seeing the feature yet, be patient – it is rolling out over the next few months, according to Google, which means it could be several weeks before you get access to it. Google didn’t state whether it is rolling out in certain regions first.