by Nik Rawlinson
What you need:WhatsApp on an Android phone or iPhone Time required: 30 minutes
Scroll back through your WhatsApp messages and what do you see? Family photos; birthday wishes; useful scraps of information, like phone numbers, addresses, and appointments. And the general chit-chat of everyday life that might raise a smile as you return to them in the future. Losing all that would be an inconvenience, not to mention a shame.
That’s why it’s important to make sure your WhatsApp chats are backed up – and with new restrictions for Android users (see Step 4), it’s worth both checking that they’re secure today, and that you plan for the future.
Although WhatsApp generally works the same on both Android and iPhone, there are significant differences in the way that each handles backups, as we’ll explain.
1 Turn on automatic updates
If you have an iPhone, open Settings and tap your name at the top of the screen. Now tap iCloud followed by iCloud Backup. Your phone will list all the devices that are backed up to your online storage, so if you have, for example, a phone and a couple of iPads, tap the iPhone to focus on just that.
On the following screen (which lists which apps’ data is backed up to your iCloud account) tap Show All Apps if WhatsApp isn’t included in the list of the five apps taking up the most space. Now scroll through the full list and make sure the slider next to WhatsApp is slid to green, indicating it’s on (see screenshot).
You can perform a manual backup whenever you want. To do so, in WhatsApp, open Settings, then tap Chats followed by Chat Backup, then ‘Back Up Now’.
On Android, which doesn’t have access to Apple’s iCloud, your WhatsApp archive is backed up to Google Drive. As you need a Google Account to set up your device in the first place, you already have everything you need to get started. However, if your phone is logged into more than one account – perhaps so you can use several calendars or receive emails from different addresses – you’ll need to make sure you’re backing up to the one you expect.
Make sure backup is set to automatic before going any further. Inside WhatsApp, tap More Options, followed by Settings, then Chats. Tap ‘Chat backup’, then ‘Back up to your Google Account’. Now select a schedule. Don’t select Never or ‘Only when I tap “Back up”’, o
