Safe to delete these?

[muddlemand]

To make space on my phone, I'd like to delete all except the most recent of the daily WhatsApp chat backups.

These (screenshot attached) are in /WhatsApp/databases/

Before I delete, please reassure me they are the old daily backups and I'm not deleting something I shouldn't!

(Wondering why they don't automatically delete as each new backup file is created. They're huge and it must clog most people's phones up terribly; it's a minority of people that know how to use a file manager and fiddle with these files, I should think. But that's separate from my question.)

 

[ocnbrze]

To make space on my phone, I'd like to delete all except the most recent of the daily WhatsApp chat backups.

These (screenshot attached) are in /WhatsApp/databases/

Before I delete, please reassure me they are the old daily backups and I'm not deleting something I shouldn't!

(Wondering why they don't automatically delete as each new backup file is created. They're huge and it must clog most people's phones up terribly; it's a minority of people that know how to use a file manager and fiddle with these files, I should think. But that's separate from my question.)

they are not huge. 1 gb is bigger then 1 MiB (i think it is a little more then a megabyte). these are small files and will not really make that much of a difference in storage space.

.....but yes those are ok to delete

 

[Hadron]

I think they probably use MiB to make clear that it's a binary MB - which anyone who knows computers would assume is what MB means anyway .

But yeah, 27MB is nothing. Your browser probably caches more than that whenever you visit any Web page. And WhatsApp does automatically delete them after a week. It provides some redundancy in case something goes wrong and one of them is corrupted or accidentally deleted. Remember that these only contain the text, any pictures or videos are stored separately in the WhatsApp media folder and not duplicated in these chat backups - unless your friends only ever send text the media folder will be massively bigger than these backups. But go and look at the size of your browser's cache if you want to worry about this type of thing (or a typical social media app, or Google Play Services, or....).

 

[muddlemand]

Thanks both, as long as I'm ok to delete them.

I was deleting everything big enough to be listed in MB rather than KB - my phone got too crowded to update anything! I see that there's only a weekful of these backups, but it would be great to be able to choose how many. I'd set it to two or three at most.

I did go to look at the browser's cache, then remembered I'd already deleted everything's cache about half an hour before...!!

Thanks anyway, I thought that's what I was looking at but glad of the reassurance.