Home storage system for MacBook Air

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Level 1

10 points

Home storage system for MacBook Air

I have an M1, 2020 MacBook Air.

It's been great because my work is mobile and it's light and compact. However, I need more storage.

I've been wondering about getting a home office system that can handle the storage and free my MacBook Air of the burden of holding all the information, as well as to provide a solid home office set up when I am working from home.

I'd like to be able to come home and save or back up new important items from my MacBook Air to keep it light on storage.

I'd like a robust home office system and keep my MacBook Air as the mobile office that updates to the home office. What is the best system to accomplish such a goal?

MacBook Air 13″

Posted on Nov 25, 2025 8:53 AM

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Answer 1

Phil0124

Level 10

216,692 points

Nov 25, 2025 9:26 AM in response to Mountainista

It's a bit unclear what you mean by "home office system".

Do you mean a new desktop based computer with more storage, or do just mean a dock you can plug the MacBook Air into that allows you to copy your files off the MacBook Air and onto an external storage drive.

Both are possible and entail slightly different things.

Even a desktop computer can still use external drives to offload files onto if required.

If you want a desktop replacement for you MacBook Air, you can go for a Mac mini, and a good display.

currently on sale on Amazon:

click here ➜ Mac mini M4, 24GB RAM, 512GB Storage - Amazon.com ($849)

You can pair it with a decent display like:

click here ➜ LG UltraFine 27" 4K Display - Amazon.com ($259 Black Friday Deal)

and an external drive like:

click here ➜ Crucial 2TB External SSD - Amazon.com ($109)

and still be under the price of a similarly configured iMac.

Alternatively, you can replace the Mac mini with just a dock to connect your MacBook Air to use it as a desktop computer with an external display and copy the files out to the external drive when you are home.

click here ➜ UGREEN Thunderbolt 5 Dock, 13-in-1, 120Gbps Transfer, Single 8K, Dual 6K60Hz Display, - Amazon.com ($299)

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Answer 2

dwb

Level 7

33,214 points

Nov 25, 2025 1:53 PM in response to Mountainista

For years notebook drives were much smaller and expensive than desktops. It isn’t clear if you have or intend to have a desktop for home and the MBA for portability or if you just intend to have an external drive at home to keep all your data with just a subset on your MBA. In either case the idea below is basically the same. In my case I had a desktop and a notebook.

I kept my music and video library on my desktop and just kept a small subset of music/videos on my notebook. I used iCloud to keep my photos in sync and let Photos keep just a thumbnail of my photos on the notebook. The upside is I could see all my photos at any time - the downside was editing required an internet connection. Today that isn’t a terrible problem since I can use my iPhone as a hotspot. I also used iCloud to sync email, notes, reminders, and appointments. That left just data I created using word processing, etc etc. For this I used a program called Chronosync to sync data back and forth between specific folders. It worked pretty well.

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