(This is my twenty-first post in a series of entries I’m using to participate in Blaugust for 2026.)
Over on PetaPixel, Jaron Schneider just published a review of an external SSD. I don’t tend to read too many reviews of new gear mainly because I tend to buy it after it hasn’t been new for a year or more, but this did get me thinking how I store things.
Over the years I’ve gotten increasingly disillusioned with cloud storage services. It’s said that “The cloud is just someone else’s computer,” which is very much true unless you’re putting your own Network Accessible Storage out there on the internet. (I will not be going over how to do that, I’m happy with my NAS being Intranet only, thank you very much.)
So what happens when the cloud storage company decides to just delete your stuff? Yes, that’s happened. Recently, in fact.
(Saving you a click: Dropbox was likely using AI to scan accounts for illegal material and it allegedly incorrectly labeled an image of the user’s son riding a Roomba as something evil. No appeal, all content not backed up went poof.)
Meanwhile, I’m here telling my students to put all of their work in their school-issued Google Drives.
This year, I’m trying something different.
Well, mostly different. My district is heavily embedded in the Google ecosystem, if I try to throw that out the window too many things will break. I can still move a bit further away, though.
Teaching in a computer lab means we don’t have much of a supply list, but I’m adding a 16 GB or larger flash drive to it. That “or larger” is hopefully going to do some heavy lifting, but I think we can get by with 16 if we have to since we don’t do any 4k editing.
“But Aaron,” I ask myself, because I’m the only one here, “What about the families that can’t afford a flash drive with the current prices skyrocketing due to on-again-off-again tariffs and AI data centers hogging all available storage manufacturing?”
I’m glad I asked! In my regular trolling of Goodwill, I’ve amassed what’s effectively a class set of flash drives.
(My method for bringing costs down, if you’re interested in knowing, was to search for the word “lot” on ShopGoodwill.com. One thumb drive would be too expensive to ship, but every now and then someone tossed a dozen of them in a box to sell together for the exact same shipping cost.)
Ideally families will be getting their own, at larger sizes than 16GB, but if they can’t or don’t, I have some they can sign out in the same way a band student might get a school instrument.
(With the same punishment for losing/destroying it, because they’re not so cheap any more.)
These drives won’t be for everything; At that size, they can’t be. But they CAN be for current projects and commonly used files, at the very least. This will free up space on the lab computers (they’ve got 256GB each, not a lot by today’s standards) while also allowing me more flexibility with seating arrangements. I can move a student as needed and if their important work can’t move with them, they’ve been saving it in the wrong spot.
On top of that, they can take the flash drives home to get things done as well.
“But Aaron,” I hear me ask again, “Couldn’t they just back things up in Google Drive to manage the same thing?”
Well, yes, but that requires decent internet. My school has it, I can’t guarantee it for my students at home.
(If you listen to my students, internet outages are the primary reason assignments cannot be handed in after 11pm on the night they’re due. Or at least, that’s what the emails sent at 11:50pm tell me.)
My hope is this method will help them better understand file and folder structures, so they can move away from the “toss it all in Google Drive and find it later” strategy that has been hit or miss for some time now, especially with how raw photos and video files are not given rather descriptive names by their cameras.
And maybe, just maybe, I can get some of them to rely a little bit less on putting everything on someone else’s computer.
(Final note: It is not lost on me that my blog description now reads “Old man yells at cloud computing” and it still took 21 days into Blaugust for me to complain about cloud computing.)