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Add Another Google Drive Account in WhatsApp: 15 GB Each

Posted on · Updated by Nadia Rowan in Apps

verified_against vendor-docs+thirdparty (the help pages, plus a route the maker documents nowhere) · verified_on · what these mean

Your phone says the backup could not finish, Google says the account is out of room, and the advice you find tells you to add another Google Drive account in WhatsApp for a fresh 15 GB. That advice is half right, and the half people get wrong is the expensive half. A second Google account does come with its own 15 GB. What it does not come with is any way to attach that space to the account you already filled.

What Google changed

Google’s storage documentation lists what shares the allowance inside one account: Drive, Gmail, WhatsApp backups and Photos. The line that matters on Android is short. WhatsApp backups on Android count toward your Google Account storage limit.

For years the opposite was true, which is why so many guides still call the backup free. A 3 GB chat archive is now 3 GB you no longer have for mail and photos in that account.

Two more rules are worth carrying around. Deleting a backup is permanent. A backup that has not been updated in five months may be removed on its own, which catches people who put an old phone in a drawer and assume the archive is waiting for them. There is a slower version of the same trap at account level: Google warns that content in an account left over quota for two years or longer may be removed.

What a second Google Drive account in WhatsApp buys you

Google puts the allowance on the account, not on the person. Each Google Account includes up to 15 GB, shared across Gmail, Drive and Photos. Make a second account and you hold a second 15 GB.

So the switch does buy something real: an empty container the same size as the first one. WhatsApp writes to whichever account is selected, one at a time, and the next backup lands there with room to spare.

Four things it does not buy:

  • Pooling. The two allowances stay separate. No setting adds them into 30 GB for one archive.
  • A bigger single backup. A 20 GB chat history fits in neither account, and switching does not change that arithmetic.
  • A move. The archive already sitting in the first account stays in the first account.
  • A restore you can forget about. The archive lives in the account that wrote it, so getting it back means signing in to that account again.

That last one is the cost people discover late. You end up holding two partial archives under two logins, and if nothing refreshes the first one, the five-month rule takes it.

Changing the account WhatsApp backs up to

Google documents the storage rule. WhatsApp publishes its own page under the title About Google Account backups, but the page builds its body in the browser and I could not pull the text to quote it. The sequence below is a third-party route: steps WhatsApp does not publish in any text I could read, reported the same way by people who have done it. The labels have held for several years, though labels move.

  1. Open WhatsApp, then Settings.
  2. Open Chats, then Chat backup.
  3. Open the Google Account row and add or pick the account you want.
  4. Run a backup and set a frequency.

Decide before you switch, not after

Order changes the answer here, so take these in order.

Find out what is filling the 15 GB. If photos or mail are the bulk of it, the backup was never the problem and moving it fixes nothing. Google’s storage page carries that breakdown.

Check the size of the current backup before you touch the account row. Once you have switched and backed up elsewhere, the old archive sits behind a login you may stop using.

Pick the account you want holding your chat history for the next several years. That is the question the switch is asking underneath, and it deserves more thought than the two taps it takes.

If what you want is a smaller backup rather than a second container, the lever is media. Chat text is small. Video is not. Clearing forwarded video out of the largest groups moves the number further than anything in the account settings, and I would do that before touching the account row at all.

The setting that decides who can read the backup

A backup stored in Google Drive carries WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption only if you switched encrypted backups on yourself. WhatsApp publishes that as an optional layer, so the default state is an archive Google can read. Changing accounts does nothing to this either way. If it matters to you, it is a more useful trip into Chat backup than the account row is.

Sources

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