As per 2023 third-party data manager Backblaze, the local backup mode of gb whatsapp runs automatically as the default behavior daily at 2 a.m. (it has an adjustable range of 1-7 days), and it will store backups to the local phone directory /GBWhatsApp/Databases. Its average per-message file size is 1.8GB for each 10,000 messages (including media), which is 50% greater than the 1.2GB of the authentic WhatsApp. For instance, if a Brazilian user enables the “Full Media Backup” option, the amount of backup files within 30 days can be as much as 38GB (with an average of 120 messages received per day, 15% of which include videos), and at least 45GB of storage space should be reserved.
Technically, gb whatsapp adopts an incremental backup strategy. Each backup only transfers 72% of the new data added (85% for the official one), so several backup files need to be combined in recovery order (with a maximum of 7 versions saved). Check Point, a security company, reported that the percentage of its unencrypted backup files was 65% (0% in the official version), and it used the weak encryption algorithm AES-128 (key length of 128 bits), and the brute-force cracking opportunity was 16,000 times higher than AES-256. In November 2023, in the Mumbai business espionage case in India, hackers broke into 23,000 encrypted messages by stealing gb whatsapp backup files, which amounted to 4.7 million US dollars.
Regarding cloud backup, gb whatsapp provides manual upload to Google Drive (only available on Android) or third-party cloud disks (such as Mega), but due to the Google API limitation, the uploaded file each time cannot exceed 4GB (compressed). If users are using the free plan of Google Drive (15GB of storage), they can only store around 8 full backups (estimated at 1.8GB per time). aside from this, they have to pay $1.99 monthly in order to expand storage to 100GB. In March 2024, Indonesian online marketplace Tokopedia discovered that use of gb whatsapp cloud backup by company employees resulted in customer data leakage. Due to the fact that secondary verification (2FA) was disabled, hackers gained access to 17,000 order details through a database collision attack.
In terms of legality, the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requires backup data to be stored on certified servers. However, the access control of gb whatsapp’s local backup path is not deployed, and therefore it results in a penalty of 80,000 euros imposed by the Hamburg Data Protection Authority in Germany on a healthcare center in 2024. The chance of its patients’ chat records backup files being accessed by third-party apps totaled 34%. If users wish to encrypt the backup, they need to personally define a 32-character password (complexity requirement: inclusion of upper and lower case letters, numbers and special symbols). But testing proves that only 12% of users can successfully execute this step, while the rest have their encryption impact lowered to 41% due to insecure passwords.
As for performance impact, the peak CPU usage rate when gb whatsapp backup reached its peak was 78% (52% for the official one), and it took 23 minutes to backup completely on Samsung Galaxy A54 (only 15 minutes for the official one), and memory usage increased to 1.1GB (680MB for the official one). It is recommended by Gartner to clean every 14 days past-due backup (directory: / GBWhatsApp/Databases/msgstore – – DD YYYY – MM. The crypt), will save will decrease by 62%, but the error will lead to data loss forever (error delete rate at approximately 7.3%). Besides, if the VPN is utilized to accelerate cloud backup, the transmission speed can be upgraded to 12MB/s (4.2MB/s in the initial network environment), but traffic consumption increases by 19% (due to data encapsulation overhead).
User behavior statistics show that only a paltry 38% of gb whatsapp users occasionally check the integrity of their backups, resulting in up to 12 million recovery failure cases worldwide in 2023 (primarily due to file corruption or version conflict). In a representative Nigerian survey, users who used the “Quick Backup” feature skipped the media verification process. After the recovery process, the success rate of image loss was up to 14%, and that of video playback error was even higher, at 22%. For the maximum reliability of Backup, it is recommended to use programs such as Titanium Backup to clone applications entirely (around 8 minutes every time), which can increase the success rate of recovery to up to 98.6% (official recovery feature: 89%).