I am in the process of looking between repairing my phone or switching to a new one. And the no brainer evolution to the OnePlus 7 Pro I have is a Pixel phone. Pixel Phones are definitely not perfect, I know that the battery would fall faster than other phones but hey, that’s ok, google chip in it, possibility to go GrapheneOs, all good.
But the A versions only having 128 GB, and needing to pay 100 extra Euro on the Normal and Pro phone for 256GB is ridiculous, and not allowing me to add a SD card for that! Is insane I restarted my phone in December fresh from zero, and in the last 9 months I used 163 GB of memory. 48GB of it is my music on Deezer, for which I pay to be able to download “HIFI” files which I am not willing to trade for using less space on my phone, I work in a place with no 4G, I’ve got a few playlist I switch between. The rest is 25 GB of Pictures, 7GB of games. 44GB of apps.
Now the answer to this is “Well now with your Pixel phone you can use the Google Cloud, Google Docs blablabla”. Something insights by Google offering 3 month of Google one and 3 month of YouTube premium when you buy a Pixel phone. So much cloud that’s soo cool! And you can just redownload things when you need it. Well I don’t want to redownload my musics everyday when I listen to them, I don’t want to trade and limit what I would call normal use. I know not everyone will resonate with this, but the carbon impact on bandwidth used from cloud in 4G is important.
Normalise SD cards, Normalise not using the Cloud as a solution for everything
Update 2 Days later
Hey, writting here because this post has brought a lot of people to talk about storage of data on phone, which is quite nice. I am writting here just because a lot of comments are repeating certain points and It wouldn’t be useful answering to all of them if after their will be more comments saying the same thing.
I am not saying Cloud = Bad. It’s great we have a place out there where we can Store Data in case anything happens. I simply wish either brand gave us more choice on data capacity, seeing a Pixel 7a only at 128 gb ain’t cool, let me make a choice. Seing a Pixel & with 128gb or having to pay an extra 100€ for 256gb when a sd card is 30€ is not cool.
A personal server is in my plans, and it’s one of the projects I’m the most impatient to have.
I understand that I have a different use of phones then the average, I simply want to be able to adapt the tools I use to my different use.
I have taken the step to take a look at the storage in my phone by curiosity and to look with a different eye my consomption of Storage, and have deleted 3gb of games, and 3gb of apps that where useless. I’ve also started looking into my photos and took out 3gb of photos I had which where useless. And I think there is more photos I’ll delete, I am not done on that of course
My signal discussion are important to me, I am in a Long Distance Relationship, and discussions I have with my SO on Signal are the major part of my relationship, and I cherish them. I have set up signal so that it makes when charging at night a copy of my discussions, and when I have Sincthing, it loads the conv to a HDD Drive on my PC. That being said, in the floders I found bugged temp file from saves that did not end, for a total of 20 gb of Signal discussions (oof lol) which where deleted too. How ridiculus was it? Well in Storage>Files the weight of total files dropped from 20,68gb to 0,68gb
Anyway, I am now at 132gb :D! I’m not writting this because I am feeling attacked or to defend myself, just as a small update and because these are reocuring comment that’s all, i’m still anwering here and there if you arrive a bit latter to the post, it’s impressive from lemmy I feel to still be receiving comments and have a discussion that continues 2 day after a post. Usually on Reddit posts would die in 6 hours, and their where no dick’s in the chat. I’ve read every single message, and answers other people did
Either you don’t have a backup of those because you don’t care, in which case you should delete them to make room, or you don’t have a backup of those and would be devastated if you lost them, which means you should back them up to the cloud, then delete them to make room. An SD card slot would be nice, you’re right there, but you’re not exactly cornered with no options here. You’re just dismissing good options because they’re not an SD card.
I have like 71gb of pictures on my phone (50k pics) and I like it that way, why would I delete them? For them to sit on my PC or in the cloud never to be looked at again?
I often go through photos on my phone, it’s like a history of the last few years and I find myself scrolling back to find a picture at least once a week.
I could use the cloud service but it’d take so long loading the thumbnails that it’s completely pointless.
“why do you put these photos on the wall? You’d be devastated if someone stole them, you should rather keep them in a box under your bed” that’s a dumb take.
You’re gonna lose them all one day.
No, because they’re both in the cloud and on my PC.
My bad, I got you confused with OP and their “under no circumstances will I back my stuff up to either the cloud or local storage” attitude. I can’t count how many people I’ve seen who feel that way right up until the moment where they’re saying “What do you mean you can’t recover them?” I sometimes get a bit preachy about it because I’ve seen people lose their wedding pics or pics of dead relatives, and I personally lost a bunch of the stuff I worked on as an undergrad that’s just gone forever now.
Yep, it’s heartbreaking. I accidentally did a full format of an HDD that had pictures of my friend who had died on it and a bunch of other stuff from the prior ~10 years. My heart sunk when I realised that I hadn’t backed up the folder beforehand. I now have a physical backup in a box, my drives are a raid 1 and I have most of the important stuff in OneDrive, which is handy if I get any crypto malware that encrypts all my data, because it has revision history. I’m not going to get caught out like that again.
But at the same time, I’m going to carry the photos on my phone over to my next phone too.