Along with battery life, display, cameras, and other specs, the amount of storage that our phones feature is another hot focus when looking to purchase a new smartphone. These days you’ll find that many smartphones no longer feature the best storage option of yesteryear, which is a microSD card slot. Instead, most manufacturers opt to go for large amounts of internal storage and urge users to take to something called “the cloud” for any extra storage they may want to use.

I’m not a huge fan of cloud storage, and I’m not sure I ever will be.

I feel torn about it sometimes. A lot of the phones that I really want to use don’t offer a microSD card slot, and there’s not much that you can really do about it if it’s not included. You cannot make a microSD card appear. You can either make do with the amount of internal storage given to you, or you can choose to start using cloud storage. Most of the time, when this happens, I choose to only use the internal storage given to me (even if that means deleting some information in order to make room).

I don’t have a totally legit reason for not using the cloud. It’s not really a “Bah, humbug,” scenario where I don’t like it just because it’s different. I think it’s more like I don’t like my information floating around out there in someone else’s database... somewhere. We’ve already seen how sometimes security can be breached in order to gain access to information that one would otherwise not want accessed; while I don’t think I’m important enough for somebody to want any of my information, it’s still just kind of a weird thought knowing that if somebody really wanted access to it, they’d have a better chance of being able to through the cloud than they would running into me on the streets and mugging me for my phone.

Cloud storage does have its perks though, and even more-so that there is available offline access through a lot of cloud storage providers as well. You would think that with the information being stored in “the cloud” that you would only be able to obtain saved data while connected to the Internet, but through some magical voodoo that isn’t quite the case. Cloud storage also comes in handy when it comes to saving files from your phone, computer, or tablet and then needing to access it from a different device. I have to admit that I do appreciate that feature more than anything else.

But for anything aside from easy file transfers, like for generally storing music, videos, photos or any other type of media I am not super thrilled about resorting to cloud storage. Although it may be an outdated method, and not even a super reliable method at that, I still prefer microSD cards. It just feels safer knowing that there’s only one copy and I have it in my possession. So what if everything gets erased just because you took it out or inserted it too hastily?! (Okay, so that actually really sucks when that happens.) At the end of the day I just prefer a hard, physical representation of where I’m storing my personal files. Of course, not everybody would agree with that sentiment.

Readers, when it comes to additional storage on your device, do you find that you prefer cloud storage over expandable, or is it the other way around for you? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below!