how to avoid paying Google Drive to store your history?

The bad news has just fallen. Over the next few weeks, Google will stop storing your WhatsApp history “for free.” Understand by this that the Mountain View firm will now count the space used by your WhatsApp backup on Google Drive. A change that may cause problems for many users.

Because the storage space allocated for free on Google Drive is not only used to store your documents. This is also shared with Google Photos and Gmail. Suffice it to say that the 15 GB of space offered risks being saturated very quickly when your WhatsApp history is counted. Taking into account the photos, videos and other documents sent and received in your conversations, it is not uncommon for a WhatsApp backup to weigh several gigabytes.

Those who do not want to put their hand in their wallet to expand the storage on Google by subscribing to a Google One offer will a priori have no other choice than to clean up their Drive. But this balancing act risks quickly pushing you to have to delete more and more data on Gmail, Google Photos and Google Drive. Unless you use a secondary Google account dedicated entirely to WhatsApp backup. It is in fact possible to configure another Google account than the one you mainly use, to synchronize your WhatsApp history. Here’s how to do it.

Also read: How WhatsApp could force you to pay for Google Drive?

1. Go to WhatsApp Settings

Open WhatsApp on your Android smartphone and tap the buttonoptions displayed at the top right of the screen, then go to the Settings of the application.

2. Change backup options

Now go to the menu Discussions and access the menu Backup discussions displayed at the bottom of the screen. Then press Google accountthen in the pop-up that appears, select your secondary Google account (if it is already configured on your Android smartphone), or choose Add an account.

Once your brand new secondary account is selected, press the button To safeguard. If you haven’t already done so, be sure to configure how often you want to save your history. Go to the section for this Back up to Google Drivethen choose the frequency of your backups.

Keep in mind that each time you configure WhatsApp on a new Android smartphone, you will need to be careful to select the Google account dedicated to saving your history. Otherwise, you will not find your conversations and the data they include.