A development after another, and always something new for the users. We obviously speak of Whatsapp and the recent, strange partnership with Google. Now you can, in fact, perform automatic backups of conversations directly to Google Drive. Surely, hearing this news, the first thing that each of us must have thought is: “Goodbye privacy!”.
Well, certainly before today you can’t say that there was a lot more, but perhaps there was one thing that Google did not know about us: our activity on Whatsapp. There was in fact, not anymore! Certainly it is really convenient to be able to save our data on a server virtually inviolable as the one made available by Google – especially for those who often change their device.
After the recent update with the introduction of Material Design, and rumors of a few weeks ago, now Whatsapp with its latest release (the 2:12:45) introduces the backup of the chat – with related media files attachments. The new feature of the messaging service most used in the world adds the missing link so far and, thanks to a new menu in the settings, and allows you to save your conversations (with related media files attachments), directly into the enormous database of Google Drive. But we must point out that all this will not be readable from outside the application, because it will have an encrypted form of protection.
It is also important to stress out that this new feature is, at least for the moment, present only in the beta version of the application, which apk you can download from here, but we’re sure that the final version will be soon available in the Play Store. The procedure is very simple. All you have to do to enable the new feature is to open Whatsapp, go to settings and then under “Settings Chat -> Backup chat”, choose to authorize your Google account, set the chronological frequency for automatic backup, the type of connectivity to use, and that’s it!.
The rest of the work will be performed automatically by the application. However, it is important to know that you can not stop the backup once started; if you have received or sent many media files through the app, the time taken to WhatsApp to end the backup on Google Drive will be rather long. You will surely appreciate the opportunity to perform automatic backups at different frequencies (daily, weekly or monthly).
Furthermore, data downloads can occur only when the device is in WiFi mode or also when you are under a mobile network: the user can choose this too. The backup will include, as you can also see from the size of uploaded files, even the media elements attached to conversations, such as photos, videos and audio recordings.
Jan Koum, CEO and co-founder of WhatsApp, announced on Facebook that the service is now used by 800 million users per month, 100 million more than in January. This result was achieved thanks also to the introduction of voice calls.