My problem is that I can't even back up in reduced quality without it just deleting the original off my phone. Leave my phone alone I have the storage I just want the extra backup. So now I use no backup at all
Let's hope we can export them too then! I stopped using WhatsApp a few years go, but it would be nice to have access to my chats, unencrypted... at the moment only iPhone users can do this
I hate that it's still not possible to set your own storage for backups. Neither WhatsApp nor Android's system backup support anything besides Google Drive.
For apps that don't disallow regular backups (like WhatsApp does), Lineage OS and Calyx support Seedvault, which is a 1:1 alternative to Google Drive, except it saves the backup as an encrypted file.