iPad Pro external drive support

I currently own a 12.9 inch IPad Pro w/ 64gb. To have more storage I bought a WD 1TB My Passport Wireless Portable External Hard Drive Used for $134.79. I downloaded the WD My Cloud app from the app store and when I'm inside the app I sync my Wireless Hard drive via Wi-Fi to my IPad Pro. Now when I go back to the app my Wireless Hard drive is visible and I can set up my wireless hard drive with a password. After I've set it up with a password I go back to settings on my IPad Pro, I tap on the wireless hard drive and I put in my password to access my wireless hard drive. From there I can now upload movies, music, or PDF documents on my IPad and also be able to save and notes or movies I have on my IPad over to the hard drive if I want to move them over to my iMac or any other computer besides just using drop box. This is great for extra storage. The only downside though is that you cannot save apps onto the hard drive so If you're looking for more space for more applications I would advise you get at least a 256gb IPad Pro. I'm fine with 64gb because I use it for all that I need. (Evernote, LumaFusion, Lightroom, Adobe Acrobat DC, Adobe Scan, Adobe Premiere Clip, Affinity Photo, Google Drive, Google Sheets, Google Docs, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube.)

Hope this helps. 🙂

Hi Apple Community,

Many of the apps nowadays will allow you to save to a cloud storage of your liking. These are Google Drive, MS OneDrive, and Apple's very own iCloud. With Apple's OS X you will get, as one of the guys mentioned, a more robust application. But if you are just using it to answer emails, compose documents, presentations, etc., then the iPad Pro does offer a better cost effective solution. Of course, you are not accounting for the wireless keyboard and the pen in which for images and photos comes in handy for touch ups. And also let's not mention that you will not have a pointer, so the pen will be your best friend.

Yes, you may have more than one option to store data/files online; however, it is always recommended to have at least one physical backup drive. Aside from the fact that one should not trust any online server as they can be hacked (and are in increasing numbers) which would mean that your private and sensitive financial/medical information would be at risk while you could be a victim of ID theft.

Personally, I do not store any identifying/sensitive info online; I prefer having multiple backups on external drives which are under my control rather than having to rely on an online server.

@ MikyDT:

There are wireless drives now (which are wireless with an iDevice and act as a regular USB drive/stick when used with a computer) - here is one I got the other day:

https://www.sandisk.com/home/mobile-device-storage/connect-wireless-stick

Just remember that sticks are not the ultimate in reliability and may fail at some point. I use mine for fast file transfer between various Macs/iDevices (not permanent storage).

No, iOS does not support using an external device as a central file storage system. All app content is actually tied to the app itself, and stored on the device in a protected memory help assigned to the app. Also, while there may be counterparts to your OS X programs, you will have to buy the iOS versions separately as programs coded for OS X cannot run on an iOS device.

I love my iPad Air 2 and Pro, but they are not at all true, 100% replacements for my MacBook Pro. For one thing, my iPads and iPhones are backed up on my Mac using iTunes. There are only two ways to backup an iOS device - over wifi to iCloud, or over wifi or USB to iTunes on a computer (I use both for redundancy). Without a computer and iTunes, you are limited to only an iCloud backup, while an encrypted iTunes backup has more content (all app passwords, for example, which are NOT part of an iCloud or unencrypted iTunes backup).

Miky, also fyi, most apps that run on iOS are nowhere near as robust as the same apps for a MacBook Pro. For instance Pages and Numbers are far more powerful and have many more options on the OS X version versus the iOS version. Likewise for apps that edit photos.

You can use a iPad Pro as a desktop replacement but you can't use the same techniques (workflow) that you are used to.There is no access to file systems on an iPad (iOS). That means you can plug in a USB drive with something like the iPad Camera Connection Kit but it won't be seen by the iPad. But you could buy an upgraded iCloud account and copy all of your files to iCloud and use the iCloud drive from your iPad Pro. You can get up to 1 TB of storage for $9.99/month. I get by with just 200 GB for $2.99/month. Another alternative is DropBox which can work with most apps on the iPad as long as they support share sheets. This isn't as direct or easy as apps that support iCloud. I use DropBox as an alternate cloud drive for when something is not compatible with iCloud.

There are a lot of photo editing tools available on the iPad. You can manage your photos with iPhoto pretty well. It does have limitations compared to iPhoto on the Mac but if your needs are relatively simple you might be able to make it work. If you need more sophisticated editing tools than iPhoto provides there are many applications in the App Store that provide more tools. I use Pixelmator a lot and it has very sophisticated photo editing tools. Of course you need to determine if it will work for you. One good thing about an iOS device, the software is constantly getting updated. Another problem for now is if you need to work with camera RAW files, the ability to work with those on an iPad are pretty limited at the moment.

Another consideration is whether you trust that Apple as a single source for all of your files and data is safe enough. The only backup is through iCloud backup and if all of your files are on iCloud drive, you've left yourself a single point of failure. This would concern me a great deal and I don't know what alternative exists except to keep a desktop machine around for offline storage and backup of files. This may defeat the whole reason you are looking at an iPad Pro.

There are a lot of good online resources to figure out if you can switch to an iOS workflow. Take a look at MacStories.net for someone who is almost exclusively on an iPad.

Look for a wireless hard drive. You won't be able to run an app from it but you can stream music and video.