Note that archiving a chat simply hides it from view in the Chats tab. If you have a large group chat, I suggest clearing it out every couple of months, which will save you a lot of space overall. If nothing, you can save it out to iCloud Drive.Ĭlearing chats will save you the most space in the quickest possible manner. It depends on what apps you have installed on your phone. Here you can choose Export Chat to first save the chat history out to a third-party program like Notes, Google Drive, OneNote, OneDrive, etc.

This will bring up a set of options at the bottom of the screen. You can clear or export a chat by swiping from right to left on the chat and then tapping on the More icon. Any new messages into those chats will begin to be saved on the phone and into iCloud like normal. Once you clear a chat, it will also disappear from the chat backup to iCloud. Note that when you clear a chat, it will remove all the previous chat history, so you need to export the chat before you clear it if you care to keep a history of the chat. Here’s an example of two cleared chats at the top of my Chats dialog. In WhatsApp, there are a couple of options you have: clear a chat, delete a chat, or archive a chat.Ĭlearing a chat will clear all the current chat history from that chat, but keep the blank chat still visible in the Chats tab of the app.

The best way to reduce the size of your WhatsApp chats and still keep the chat history is to export and then clear. Now that we know which chats are using up the most space, we can start to clear them out. So is the next group chat right below that. Next, tap on Storage Usage at the bottom.įinally, you will get a listing of which chats (group or individual) are taking up the most space on your phone.Īs you can see, my Family group chat is eating up almost half a gigabyte of data. So we know the app is taking up almost 3 GB of space, but which chats inside WhatsApp are the space hoggers? To figure that out, open WhatsApp, tap on Settings at the bottom right and then tap on Data and Storage Usage. When you look at the Storage & iCloud Usage screen, it only shows you the total amount of space being taken up by WhatsApp, which isn’t really all that useful. First, you should try to figure out which chats are taking up the most space in WhatsApp.

Whatsapp inc data shared by 2 apps