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How do you get around not having a USB Port?

marc55

marc55

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Oct 14, 2011
872
217
Since built in storage costs so much, and 128GB isn't really that much, how do you guys get around using an iPad, or iPad Pro without a USB port?

I would like to be able to access files, like pictures and music on an external drive.

I don't know how any of the tablet manufacturer's expect a tablet to replace a desktop/laptop without a USB port. The Surface Pro is the only one I know of that has a USB port.

So, how do you guys get to your large files without a USB Port?

Thank you
 
For video I use a home UPnP server and just stream it. For smaller files iCloud drive or any other cloud service, or shared folders on the network.
 
Same as on my iMac and Macbook. Not at all. I don't think I've used USB on a computer to connect anything other than to charge my phone or ipad for a number of years. Shared documents are on a local NAS or cloud, other stuff either BitTorrent Sync so they're always everywhere or Dropbox/Onedrive.
 
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I wouldn't make a purchase decision based on this, but the iPP has a USB 3.0 host controller, and apparently adapters are coming eventually to make something happen using it. What exactly? No idea.
 
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Airdrop, Dropbox, Box.

I transferred a 785mb PDF file last night from my shared drive on my home network via Airdrop right to the iPad Pro. I haven't really needed USB for an iPad with many gigs of cloud storage and a 2TB home NAS.

My camera is my iPhone 6+ though, so I don't really use RAW/DSLR/SD, etc.
 
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iCloud, Dropbox, OneDrive. 128GB perhaps isn't that much compared to, say, my desktop, with three 6TB drives on it (main drive plus two Time Machine backups). But for an iPad, nothing I do gets that big anyway. Not editing one hundred 20 megapixel photos on it...

Music - I can store some locally and stream the rest. Movies - load a few that I'll watch on the road. Stream the rest or change them out when I get home. Transferring files to others - AirDrop or link to DropBox or OneNote. Occasionally someone will have a file on a USB drive, but it's becoming more and more uncommon. I'll just shoot them an email and ask for a link or give them my public Dropbox link instead.

Honestly, it hasn't been much of a problem. Far less hassle than when Apple dropped floppy drives off the Mac, that's for sure.
 
One aspect of this is the quality of available Internet access. At home where I have 60Mbs connectivity with a dedicated wireless router, cloud and NAS solutions work great. But on the road, where wireless can really be sketchy, that's where off-line storage becomes a different issue and why I use the FileHub. I never turn it on for other than test purposes at home. I recently bought a Leef iAccess microSD card reader:

http://www.leefco.com/iaccess

but unfortunately, while the concept is good, the implementation is problematic with buggy s/w. I regret the purchase.
 
I've been doing about 90% of my work on an iPad for a few years now.

I had a 128 GB iPad 4 and never used anywhere near that. My current iPad Air 2 is 64 GB and I'm using about 24 GB currently. (No video projects or downloaded media currently).

Regardless of the amount of storage on my iPad, I have transitioned to a cloud-based work life this past year. It simply became imperative to me that my documents and photos were synced and available to me everywhere. I don't know what a USB drive looks like any more. :D

Everything I work on or with is either on DropBox, iCloud or my university's enterprise Box account, depending on the degree of security I need and how "sharable" I need it to be. My music is on iTunes Match/Apple Music.

My photos are a little different. My personal photos and images for teaching presentations are in Photos. My art documentation and creative photos are in Mylio, with originals stored on a hard drive linked to my laptop but with thumbnails on my iPhone, previews on my iPad and selected originals also available on my iPad.

I work on documents and then save them back to the various clouds and I stream my music, movies and TV shows (except for the rare times I go on vacation and decide to download a few things to my iPad).

I have a Verizon MiFi with unlimited data through my university and I take that with me when I travel and also use that as my home wireless router.

I do still have my laptop as a mother ship, with its external drives and multiple backups (to safeguard my professional images, to archive files until I finally jettison them, and to upload images from my old Sony Alpha. But, I could always upload directly to my iPad with the lightening-SD card adapter.)
 
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marc55 said:
Since built in storage costs so much, and 128GB isn't really that much, how do you guys get around using an iPad, or iPad Pro without a USB port?

I would like to be able to access files, like pictures and music on an external drive.

I don't know how any of the tablet manufacturer's expect a tablet to replace a desktop/laptop without a USB port. The Surface Pro is the only one I know of that has a USB port.

So, how do you guys get to your large files without a USB Port?

Thank you
Click to expand...

Have you looked at Dropbox. It the cloud but stores everything for me no matter what platform I am using.
 
I have a MacBook Pro and desktop.

The iPad for me is a consumption device, it can access anything my other computers see on the network or cloud.
 
Get the Lightning camera connection kit and you have a usb port that works for a lot of things.
 
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Dropbox. I use it with my android platforms that do have a USB port so I have really moved past the usb connections.
 
My pictures and music take up ~200GB. I don't want to pay for cloud storage, and I was trying to figure out a way to access files stored on an external HD.

I just started looking into something like the Seagate Wireless Plus external HD, and that may be the answer of now.

Fuchal said:
Get the Lightning camera connection kit and you have a usb port that works for a lot of things.
Click to expand...

I didn't think the iPad Air2 lightning's port would support an external HD?

MH01 said:
I have a MacBook Pro and desktop.

The iPad for me is a consumption device, it can access anything my other computers see on the network or cloud.
Click to expand...

Agree the iPad is a consumption device; how do you access everything on your MBP?

Thank you
 
marc55 said:
My pictures and music take up ~200GB. I don't want to pay for cloud storage, and I was trying to figure out a way to access files stored on an external HD.

I just started looking into something like the Seagate Wireless Plus external HD, and that may be the answer of now.



I didn't think the iPad Air2 lightning's port would support an external HD?



Agree the iPad is a consumption device; how do you access everything on your MBP?

Thank you
Click to expand...

To clarify, I use the MBP to Setup, configure and maintain my home network, including my Nas.

My mbp can access and use all my files , as it boot camps into Windows also.

My iPads can only access what iOS allows.
 
Honestly, the only thing that I've used USB on my rMBP in the past few years is for a wireless mouse for the rare occasion that I play a game on it. For everything else I've adapted to the cloud to suit my needs.

File storage: iCloud Drive
Music: iTunes Match and Apple Music
Pictures: iCloud
Movies/TV: Plex, Netflix, etc.

The only time I've actually transferred files to my iPad in the past few years was to put movies into VLC for plane rides and long car trips, and that's the only reason I can really see for ever needing access to local files for my personal use cases.
 
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artfossil said:
I've been doing about 90% of my work on an iPad for a few years now.

I had a 128 GB iPad 4 and never used anywhere near that. My current iPad Air 2 is 64 GB and I'm using about 24 GB currently. (No video projects or downloaded media currently).

Regardless of the amount of storage on my iPad, I have transitioned to a cloud-based work life this past year. It simply became imperative to me that my documents and photos were synced and available to me everywhere. I don't know what a USB drive looks like any more. :D

Everything I work on or with is either on DropBox, iCloud or my university's enterprise Box account, depending on the degree of security I need and how "sharable" I need it to be. My music is on iTunes Match/Apple Music.

My photos are a little different. My personal photos and images for teaching presentations are in Photos. My art documentation and creative photos are in Mylio, with originals stored on a hard drive linked to my laptop but with thumbnails on my iPhone, previews on my iPad and selected originals also available on my iPad.

I work on documents and then save them back to the various clouds and I stream my music, movies and TV shows (except for the rare times I go on vacation and decide to download a few things to my iPad).

I have a Verizon MiFi with unlimited data through my university and I take that with me when I travel and also use that as my home wireless router.

I do still have my laptop as a mother ship, with its external drives and multiple backups (to safeguard my professional images, to archive files until I finally jettison them, and to upload images from my old Sony Alpha. But, I could always upload directly to my iPad with the lightening-SD card adapter.)
Click to expand...

After reading this over a few times I came to a conclusion. My 'guess' is.....

You Ma'am, are living the future of computing.

Like it or not, many of us on this forum (the minority compared to the masses) are rapidly becoming 'old school' in the way we've always done and think about computing.

I think the days of 'needing' terabytes of storage on your mobile device are fading as Cloud solutions become more developed and implemented. The pendulum is starting to swing the other way. No longer will it be how many Gigabytes of storage can I get crammed into a device but rather how little storage do I actually need anymore. 128Gb will seem like overkill in the future.

My Gen X niece is constantly on her mobile devices. She, and all her friends live in the mobile information highway. She won't even own anything that isn't mobile and has grown up living in the iOS environment. She came by one day and saw me with my MBP sitting on my lap and asked when I was getting an iPad. She said couldn't imagine owning such a 'heavy' and 'bulky' device (much less a desktop computer) and that none of her friends own anything other than a smart phone or tablet (most of them having an iPhone and iPad).

At first I was like, whatever, she doesn't know what she's talking about. Later, I realized she DOES know what she's talking about. Unlike me (I'm 56), she has practically grown up with a mobile device in her hands. She just 'naturally' talks more 'techy' then I ever did at her age. She knows the capabilities and functions of her computing devices far beyond what I currently know about mine.

As I've said before. The iPad Pro is poised to usher in the future to the rest of us. Today, it's just a way overpowered iPad with some new cool features, and unfortunately this early on that's all many can envision it to ever be. However, in the near future, when a maturing iOS and pro level apps in development catch up to and are able to exploit it's powerful hardware, the Pro true intent and place in the future of computing will become more and more apparent.

Just a hunch.
 
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xraydoc said:
This is a good app. It'll do a network scan and let you log in and browse & manage files on just about anything (Mac, PC, NAS, etc.). You can then open files into another app or stream media directly from the source.
Click to expand...

Another +1 for FileBrowser. Works great with my PCs and NAS on my network and also with the attached USB drive & SD card when using the FileHub. I like that they added video streaming through other apps as I like to use Infuse.
 
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yes FileBrowser is great, and if you decided to build a NAS so you can have your own cloud and not pay someone else for the privilege rockstor is great as it supports btrfs, just like the new DSM from synology will do for 6.0 except synology only added support for btrfs in quad core models, thank god for XPEnology because it allows DSM to be installed on any system.
 
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