only thing is.....I don’t know how to install the external drives. so paying is my answer...... I pay for dang near everything.

You can buy 1tb from Best Buy for about $70. Plug into usb drive on you computer open your my computer and love for the plugged in drive then locate files you want and drag them over. There are easy instructions in the box how to do it. I took a lot of stuff off my cloud account and put them into an external drive.

thank you.

You should be able to sync all your image, doc, and audio content to a computer as well.

what do you use your iPad for? Do you also have an iPhone?

no iPhone. How do I use google?? I don’t use google as my search engine, I use DuckDuckGo for searching.......so how would I use google for storage?? I just didn’t want the “following” of me on google.

Google Apps. If you use the Chrome browser, there's all kinds of great extensions and apps that work with Chrome and Google. If you "Sign In to Chrome" using your Google log in and create a profile, then, on any computer that has a Chrome browser installed you add a new user, "sign into" Chrome, All your settings, bookmarks, customization, like themes and extensions, get loaded automatically.

Then, when your done working on that computer, you can delete the user from Chrome, but still have all the changes made to your profile while in that session available to you when you sign it "at home."

I regularly use 2 different Chrome profiles, a personal one using my own google account, and one for work using my work google domain account. Each has it's own set of bookmarks and settings.

Google and Chrome have created a great "ecosystem." You should check it out. Google Docs are pretty cool and Google drive gives you a decent amount of free storage in which you can create any kind of folder tree you want. And from there share out whatever docs or folders to whomever you choose. You can set view only, or edit permissions. Lots of cool stuff.

(I don't use it, so I can't give detailed descriptions or directions.)

You should be able to download your photos and videos from iCloud to your computer, and then delete them from your iPad/iCloud to free up space (in theory).

Make sure to backup the files you retrieve from the cloud in multiple places just in case a drive or device fails. (You could even use a different free cloud drive service for backups from your computer.)

Perhaps you should ask in the Apple Users Group for advice on managing the storage space of iCloud - someone in there is more likely to be familiar with how it integrates with iPads and iPhones.