Backup your WhatsApp messages to your Google Drive

As amazing as WhatsApp is, one major downside is that if you get yourself a new phone, chances are you’ll lose your entire message history. Now when you consider how much the app dominates our communications, for both business and personal reason, losing all those communiques can prove to be very problematic.

WhatsApps does allow backing up of your messages to your phone's internal storage, but transferring that means getting a PC involved and can be a bit of a chore. The latest update for WhatsApp will simplify this process tremendously, by allowing you to back up your WhatsApp messages to your Google Drive and when you do transfer phones, the app will automatically retrieve it, restoring your entire message history. It will be as if you never changed phones. Sadly, there’s no support for the feature on Apple phones yet. 

The feature started with a staggered roll out earlier in the month, so it may not be available on your phone yet. To check, open WhatsApp and tap 'Settings', then ‘Chats and calls', and see if there's a 'Chat backup' option listed. If you all you see, is ‘Back up chats’, then the feature isn’t available to you yet and you’ll have to wait on the next update.

However, there is a way to get the feature sooner for the impatient, by manually installing the update. To do that visit the WhatsApp's site on your phone and download the official .apk file. Note that you will have to uninstall your current WhatsApp installation before you install the .apk file. Then simply install that file and you should be good to go. At this point the Google Play store may inform you that there is an update available for WhatsApp, ignore it. It is actually the older version that you just uninstalled. 

If your phone will not allow the installation of the .apk file you’ll need to change your security settings. Simply go to the phone’s 'Settings', tap on 'Security', and then tap 'Enable' in the 'Unknown sources' section. The installation should proceed normally now. 

With the new version installed and activated, you should automatically be presented with a screen to select how often you want message backups to happen and which Google account to use, if you have multiple ones on the phone. You are free to change these settings at any time.

From this point on, whenever you move your SIM to a new phone, WhatsApp will automatically recover all messages from your Google Drive and you can carry on as if nothing has changed.