Cloud storage and external drives tend to get talked about like they're competing ways to store your files.
For most people, that isn't actually useful and they're good at different things.
Cloud storage is incredibly convenient when you want files available across your devices, need to share something with another person or simply don't want to think about which computer has the latest copy.
External storage gives you something different. It's storage you physically have, with a fixed amount of space you can use however you want. It can hold large collections without depending on an internet connection, and it can be dedicated to a particular purpose instead of becoming another general place where everything ends up.
There's plenty of room for both.
The Cloud Is Really Good at Convenience
The biggest advantage of cloud storage is probably the most obvious one: your files aren't tied to the computer sitting in front of you.
Save something on one device and you can get to it somewhere else. Send somebody a link instead of attaching a huge file. Work on something at home and pick it up later from another computer.
For files you're actively using across several devices, that's hard to beat.
It's also useful for things you regularly share. A team can keep working documents together. A teacher can share course materials with students. Someone working with a client can give them access to the files they actually need without handing over an entire drive.
There are good reasons cloud storage has become part of everyday computing.
But that doesn't mean everything needs to live there.
Sometimes You Just Want the Drive
External storage starts making more sense when you've got a lot of material you want to keep together.
A musician may have a large library of recordings and sample files. Someone restoring old photographs might be building an archive of high-resolution scans. A video project can get very large very quickly.
There are also plenty of projects where you simply like the idea of having the whole thing in your possession.
You know how much storage you've got. You know where the files are. You don't need an internet connection to open them, and you're not deciding what to remove because you've reached the limit of a cloud plan.
An external drive can also become something more specific than "extra storage."
You might have one dedicated to music production, scanned artwork, coursework or a collection of creative projects you've been building over time.
That's a different relationship with your files than having them mixed into the same cloud account that also contains phone photos, invoices and the recipe you downloaded two years ago.
Projects Can Use Both
This is where the distinction gets more useful.
Imagine you're planning a long trip.
You could keep the whole project on an external drive: maps, booking confirmations, research, packing lists, photographs and everything else you want to keep together.
But you might put a few documents in the cloud because you want to share them with the people travelling with you.
There's no conflict there.
Or maybe you're producing a podcast. The original recordings and complete project stay on your external SSD, while selected audio files go into cloud storage so a collaborator can review them.
A collection of digitised artwork could live primarily on an external drive, with another copy of the most important files stored elsewhere for protection.
The question doesn't have to be cloud or external storage?
It can simply be where does this particular file make the most sense?
External Storage Can Be More Than a Place for Files
One reason we built Homescreen around external storage is that a drive can be a really useful home for an entire project.
Normally, you plug in a drive and see files and folders. That's perfectly fine when that's all you need.
Homescreen adds a project layer to the drive.
So instead of thinking only in terms of where a file belongs, you can create the project it belongs to and keep the files alongside its notes, links and other information.
A travel plan can be a project. So can a podcast, a research project, a course, a small creative business or years of work on a hobby.
The external drive holds the material. Homescreen helps give that material some context.
And using Homescreen doesn't mean the cloud suddenly disappears from your life.
You can still share files online when that's useful. You can still keep copies elsewhere. You can still use whatever cloud services make sense for the way you work.
Homescreen is simply built around the idea that sometimes it's useful to have the project itself with you, on your own storage.
Think About What You're Actually Storing
A handful of documents you open from your phone, laptop and work computer probably makes a lot of sense in the cloud.
Two terabytes of raw audio from a project you're producing at home may make much more sense on an external SSD.
A set of important financial records might live on your computer, an external backup and somewhere else for safekeeping.
A project you're carrying between computers could live on an external drive while the handful of files you're collaborating on stay in shared cloud storage.
There isn't one storage choice that wins all of those situations.
And there doesn't need to be.
The useful part is understanding what each kind of storage is good at, then using it where it makes your life easier.
For a lot of people, the best setup won't be cloud storage or external storage. It'll most likely be some combination of both.
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