How to easily increase storage on a Chromebook

If you have been reading this blog, you are doubtless aware that I enjoy my Chromebooks for basic productivity tasks, but they do have a few shortcomings, one of which is a meager amount of internal storage. To be fair, Chrome OS is designed to need minimal storage space, as it is designed to make use of cloud storage such as Google Drive to save files, but I also like to save them locally. Both of my Chromebooks came with 64GB and little in the way of upgrade options, save for adding a micro SD card. Fortunately, these are dirt cheap, which made it possible for me to triple the amount of available storage for about the cost of a fast food value meal.

I purchased a 128GB card for each machine for $10 apiece, which provided an instant upgrade as soon as I placed the cards in their slots. The only real problem was that while the card was mounted in the Files app, it was not visible to Linux applications running under the Crostini Linux environment. This is because Crostini is intended primarily as a developer environment, so everything in there is walled off from the rest of Chrome OS. 

Access can be granted easily enough by right-clicking the micro SD card's icon in the Files app and clicking a menu choice to allow Linux access. Now that the card is recognized by Crostini, one must create a path for direct access in LibreOffice. This is accomplished by choosing the open file command in LibreOffice, then select '+Other Locations' on the left side of the window. The main window will then show an icon labeled 'Computer' Double-click it and scroll down the menu until you find a folder labeled 'mnt' (mount). Open that and then open the folder labeled 'chromeos' and then open the folder labeled 'SD Card', or whatever your SD Card is named, and click 'Add to Bookmarks'. Your SD card will now appear on the left side of the window and you will be able to open and save files directly from LibreOffice. 

The cool part is once you do this for one application, the SD card will be available to others as well. I created a bookmark in LibreOffice and then opened the GIMP photo editing application to discover the SD card was visible there, ready to be accessed. Best of all, the SD card can be removed and replaced with one from another device, such as a digital camera, to access those files, then put back without having to repeat the setup process.

 So now, both of my 64GB Chromebooks have a total of 192GB of storage and readily accessible to both the Linux and Chrome OS partitions. This small addition should serve to make the Chromebooks that much more useful—and useful. Best of all, it did not require using the command line at all, just a few mouse clicks. If you have a Chromebook and your internal drive is feeling a bit claustrophobic, there really is no reason not to expand it using an inexpensive micro SD card.