Adventures in NOT buying things

I’ve been thinking about external storage for the last few days, for our iOS devices. When we bought my wife’s iPhone XS Max, we made the mistake of going for the 64 GB option. Pretty soon, tired of a filled-to-the-brim phone, she opted for Apple’s 50GB iCloud solution, priced at $1/mo, to both backup her photos and to shut up Apple’s continuous prompts about a full iCloud.

This solution has been serving her well. Somehow, her photo storage needs have landed at about a 100 GB, which sits well between her phone and the cloud.

But more and more, I’ve been thinking that I want to get rid of the dollar a month charge. For that, the obvious way would be to have daily backups and cleanup, but the question becomes, “to what?”

Dropbox seems like an obvious choice. So does OneDrive. But there’s something irksome about cloud storage. It feels like a gambit – these cloud providers want more of your money, and getting us hooked on Dropbox’s initial awesomeness and then baiting-and-switching to the shitty version of the company they’ve become leaves just an odd taste in my mouth.

So I started thinking of some sort of hardware solution. Many companies have come and gone (see pogoplug), but there’s a product from a few years ago that instantly popped into my mind – the SanDisk iXpand flash drive. This is a little widget that connects to your iPhone through a lighting connector and sucks out all your photos. Compared to when I first saw it, the pricing seems affordable now – 256 GB sets you back $60. The device is actually pretty neat because the other end is a USB-A port, so you can plug it into your computer when it’s time to backup your backups.

But then I started thinking – maybe 256 GB is enough, but the lightning port certainly is not. What if I move to Android one day? Or Apple dumps this port for a USB-C in the future? That’s what freezes me – the what-ifs. Instead of living (and spending) in the now, I worry that my choices might be proven wrong in the future.

So I started looking for wireless storage devices, the kind that can connect through wifi and an app, and work with a majority of devices. First hit – LaCie FUEL 1TB – for $136 on Amazon. Holy crabapples! Twice the price and 4x the storage? Ridiculous! The second result? WD 4TB My Passport Wireless Pro for $190. Oof. I need to do more research! What if I opt for the 4 TB and just around the corner (on the second page of the search results) is a 12 TB one for just a bit more? Storage is a strange world.

These external storage options aren’t without their issues though – sometimes their apps haven’t been updated in a few years, meaning they don’t support new features or even new iOS versions. Most of the apps I looked at (WD My Cloud Home being one) don’t seem to support background uploading. Google Photos and Dropbox can upload your photos to the cloud when charging, but WD has trouble uploading to the HDD sitting next to your phone. Cool.

So, once again, I’m frozen. I know the iXpand is not the best solution. The market has moved on, there is more storage available for a better price, and the future-proofing aspect of using wireless just makes sense.

But there’s one more weird thing at the back of my mind – why fix something that isn’t broken? If my wife’s current storage needs are met at $12/year, then why spend upwards of a hundred dollars to solve it in a worse way (if background uploads don’t work). If I just tell myself that I’m paying $1/month for “external storage”, I’m a much happier person. Aren’t I?

Do you, dear reader, use any external wireless mobile storage? Which one? Are you happy with it? What quirks does it have?