If you wanted an iPhone with a terabyte of storage it would cost you 1549 CHF for the iPhone 16 Pro. With the Fairphone 4 128 GB model you would pay 329 CHF for the phone and 101 to 109 CHF for a 1TB card. That’s about 440 CHF and you’d have an absurd amount of storage. Absurd because you never want to lose a device with that much data on an SD card.
While on one of my numerous walks I heard about ExFAT being compatible between windows, macOS and Linux so I was tempted to experiment with the file system. I heard this while listening to a podcast as I often do.
When I was on an iBook, or a Mac Book Pro, or a Mac Book Pro and a Mac Book Air I could be on APFS and Mac OS Journaled but as I slid to windows during the early days of the pandemic, and back to Linux last year, so the need for a file format that is compatible with all systems became more interesting.
When experimenting with the Immich iPhone app I found it impossible to upload beyond 15,000 images and I supposed that it was because the phone timed out before it had checked all the previous files before moving on to the last four thousand images. In reality the problem is that Immich downloads the media from iCloud and leaves it on the phone. The result is that if you have one hundred gigabytes of photos on iCloud you need one hundred gigabytes of storage ony your phone.
Nextcloud is an open source file sharing solution that has iOS, MacOS, Android, Windows and Linux apps. You can install it via a docker container, natively or via a number of other solutions. For my experiment I installed via Docker on Windows but haven’t done anything with it, and with Nextcloudpi. The latter is an ISO image that you can download and install to an SD card using the Raspberry Pi Imager.
A few years ago I bought a 256 gigabyte iphone because I wanted more space and for a long time it was great because it meant that I had plenty of room to grow into. The issue comes when you get to over 200 gigabytes of data stored in iCloud because you go from 3 CHF per month to 10 CHF per month. You go from 36 CHF per year to 120 CHF per year.
KDrive peaks my interest because instead of cost over 100 dollars per year it costs around 64 if you buy directly from their website rather than The Apple App Store, but also because once you send your photos up to the cloud, you can get them down more easily.
With Google One you can store all of your images to the cloud quite easily but because apps like Picasa and others no longer exist, you cannot get them back without spending hours downloading them manually.