The lack of expandable storage is one of the big negatives of life with an iPad, and one of the biggest stop signs for people wanting to ditch their laptop altogether. Whether it be pictures and video taken with the iPad itself or music and movies from a personal collection, the 16 and 32 GB models can become cramped quite quickly, and the 64 Gb and 128 GB models can be quite expensive. Luckily, there are a few solutions for expanding the storage on your iPad.

PC Storage

Your laptop or desktop PC remains one of the best ways to keep your iPad lean and mean, so long as you still actually own a PC. Your can save storage on your iPad in two different ways: (1) copy photos and videos to your PC and remove them from your iPad and (2) turn on home sharing to stream music and movies to your iPad.

Home sharing is great for the iPad that rarely leaves the house. The ability to stream your movies means you don't need to waste that precious storage space on your media collection. It is also relatively easy to accomplish. Home sharing is a feature of iTunes, and once you turn it on in iTunes for your PC, you should see it show up in the Music and Videos apps on your iPad.

How to Set Up Home Sharing on Your PC

Cloud Storage

The easiest way to expand the storage of your iPad is to use a cloud service like Dropbox or Google Drive. Cloud storage uses the Internet as a second hard drive. While "the Cloud" can sometimes sound like a magical place, remember, the entire Internet is really just a set of computers connected together.

Cloud storage is using the hard drive storage space from an external location like Google or Dropbox for your own storage needs.

The best part about Cloud storage is that it is disaster-proof. No matter what happens to your iPad, you'll still have any files transferred to the cloud. So you could lose your iPad and still retain your files. This is why iCloud makes such a good backup location and why other cloud services make a great way to expand your storage. Unfortunately, it requires an Internet connection, isn't always as fast as other solutions and can be more expensive over time.

How to Set Up Dropbox on Your iPad

External Hard Drive

The most traditional way of expanding storage is to simply add another hard drive to the mix. But the iPad complicates this by not working with conventional USB external drives. However, there are number of external hard drives that include a Wi-Fi adapter so that the iPad can communicate with them through a secured Wi-Fi connection. These drives can be a great way to give your iPad access to your entire media collection whether you are in the house or away from home. And most of these drives support uploading photos, videos and documents, so you can trim space from your iPad while saving space by not weighing it down with all of your music and movies.

When picking out an external hard drive, it is important to make sure it works with the iPad. These drives will include a free app that allows the iPad to communicate with the external drive.

The Best External Hard Drives for the iPad

Flash Storage

Think Flash drives don't work with the iPad? Think again. While you can't simply hook a Flash drive into an iPad, and using a go-between like the camera connection kit won't work either, companies like AirStash have created a solution that utilize Wi-Fi in the same way as some external drive. These adapters aren't storage devices by themselves; you will still need to buy an SD card. But the versatility of these adapters allow you to buy multiple Flash drives, tailoring the amount of space to your needs. They also allow for easier transferring of documents between multiple computers at multiple locations, so they can be ideal for a business solution.  Buy an AirStash from Amazon.

Read More: How to Save Space on Your iPad