It's part of a handy update though.

There is nothing worse in this world than going into your social media archives to try and find a certain photo or message, only to discover that it has been suspiciously wiped from your device. Not war, not murder, nothing - nothing is worse. WhatsApp, as far as apps go, is generally quite good at keeping all your past bits stored in an easy to find location... even if the app itself does take up a load of storage on your phone. That's all about to change though as the messaging app is set to introduce a new way to store data, keeping them on Google Drive, instead of on your actual phone. This is good news because that means that a load of storage will then be freed up on our actual devices... but bad news if you haven't been backing up your WhatsApp in the past year. If you've failed to back up your WhatsApp data in the past year, this will be entirely wiped from the current Google Drive it's being stored on. This doesn't mean that it'll be gone from your phone, but if you delete the app or try to use a different device, your messages and photos probably won't be there. The Sun reports that WhatsApp sent out an email to users explaining the change. They said:

“Due to a new agreement between WhatsApp and Google, WhatsApp backups will no longer count against Google Drive storage quota.

“However, any WhatsApp backups that have not been updated in more than a year will automatically be removed from storage.”

Better get backing up, lads.