Micro rant: I don't understand how the main chat app of one of the biggest companies in the world has such abysmal docs for core functionality. No answers online are sufficient. Their help mainly just offer canned responses. I'm praying wisdom of the crowds helps provide clarity before I lose my mind.

Google Drive is being very aggressive in notifying me that I'm over my free drive storage limit and that I can no longer backup properly (Whatsapp backups count against your storage since December 2023). Most of the drive's storage is taken up by Whatsapp chat and media backup.

My thought process is simple: "Okay, I need basic answers to understand what/how I can accomplish what I want to get done."

What I want to get done:

1. Have concurrent backups - once to Google Drive, once to local phone storage

2. Easily find the chats and media grouped together under one "whatsapp backup" folder

3. Move backups to computer storage every so often.

You'd think this would be simple - or at least have yes/no answers if it's even possible, but why make things easy for the user?

So far, this is what i've gathered:

• "You can only restore chats stored in your phone’s WhatsApp database if you’re using Android OS 9 or below." Okay, so not possible to anyone with a modern phone. Then what's the point of the database backup to local storage? Is there a way to view the chats properly without a restore? I also see no option of doing this for media. Is this just a different way to say there's no rationale in backing up to internal storage?

• You can "export" chat history with/without media, but it only includes the last 100,000 messages... so again, not very relevant.

• If you override your latest backup with an older backup, you can't undo or reload the newer backup (it gets "wiped") - why? [Note: this isn't something I read, but something I experience when I upgraded my phone a few months ago]

The bottom line here is that I simply don't understand if it's possible to do Whatsapp chat + media backups with near full functionality for restore via local storage. If not, I want to save most media as files (move over images, videos, etc) to my phone's local storage and to my PC. I then want to continue saving the latest chats + media in Google Drive (this seems like the only way to do proper backups for future restores if one needs to transfer Whatsapp to another phone)

Whatsapp has no live chat support and their email responses are slow and ineffective.

PLEASE. If someone has delved into this topic and can help me out, or even if someone here can get me in touch with someone who knows more about this (even if it's Zuckerberg himself) I'll be so grateful.

Feel free to DM if it's easier.

Thank you so much!

I think I know the answer to this - that it isn't possible - but has anyone found a way?