I am sure this has been asked before, but why can’r Glowforge increase the memory in the machines so you don’t always have to go to the cloud.
I make coasters and the design is complex. It takes 46 min to engrave and cut 4 at a time. Everytime I go to make another set, It has to upload the same design which takes more than 4 min every time. It seems to me, this should be a simple fix for Glowforge, when a person wants to make several of the same thing.
It would save alot of time.
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They have never said why they do it this way, but as far as I know there is no plan or focus on making this change happen.
As for the technical reason - I’m not sure if it’s a memory thing. Once the job is sent back to your glowforge and you get the glowing button, it no longer communicates with the web. That means that the job is stored in memory on the Glowforge somewhere, so in theory there shouldn’t be a reason they couldn’t let you run the job again locally. It’s a mystery and lots of people have asked for it, maybe this time they’ll listen?
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Great idea – Support doesn’t monitor this portion of the forum, so the best way to submit your suggestion is to email it to support@glowforge.com
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This idea is a very common one to be suggested. I suspect that the actual process leaves the storage empty as it feeds like a virtual ticker tape. This also keeps the methods they use not available to discover their methods. I think if it were as easy as it seems it would be done already.
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All the way back to 2017 at the minimum - but I’m pretty sure the answer remains
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That’s not an indication of how easy or difficult it is, it’s an indicator of how profitable it is.
If a feature won’t make Glowforge money, it’s much less likely to get done, easy or not.
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You can research into cloud storage vs local storage and see the pros and cons.
Common benefits of cloud is cost effective, accessibility, ability for updating, recovery, etc.
I picked GF because it’s cloud storage and the perks of GF being able to trouble shoot remotely, ability to manage multiple GF at the same time, not have to deal with limits of storage, etc.
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There is far more to profit than hanging on the customer like a lamprey. There are indeed many companies that do not understand this as I have noted in other posts. From what I have seen from Glowforge they do understand this.
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You do unless you’re a premium subscriber. Non premium members only get 30 days of storage.
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This isn’t really about cloud storage though since the job isn’t ran from the cloud. The motion file is downloaded and then processed locally. Basically, the ask is to just hold onto that data until you’ve decided to move on to another project versus releasing the local data when the job is over.
As far as the making money aspect of it, it might not make money, but it would save processing cycles and money. Overall, I think it would make it a more enjoyable experience.
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Yeah but it won’t sell more machines or materials — especially to the middle market of crafters, which is where they’re aiming at from what I can tell.
What does sell glowforges? Ease of use. Trying to convince nontechnical people to get on board with design tools. By the time you think “man I wish l I could just repeat this job” you’re already locked in on the platform and you just figure out how to move forward.
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In your opinion, if a job is not run from a cloud, then there is no cloud storage?
When I say cloud storage I am talking about the standard definition. Projects I am working on, past projects, catalog projects, etc. are not stored locally on the glowforge. I consider that cloud storage and it is the definition version of cloud storage for which I picked the glowforge for.
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I can’t really argue with that. It will help keep people investing in the platform though. The cheapest customer is the one you already have. Like @MyDogsThinkImCrazy mentioned, it’s super easy to run multiple machines with the cloud integration. Crazy easy to run a fleet of machines. Many people have multiple Glowforges, but some are also leaving the platform in favor of other manufacturers. Some of that is productivity reasons, some reliability reasons, some just jumping on the bandwagon… 
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that’s not really what this thread (and @jbmanning5’s comment) are about, tho. the thread is about rerunning the processed job once it’s downloaded to the machine. file storage in the cloud is done as unprocessed SVG files. when you run a stored file again, it processes again and downloads to your GF (again).
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That’s not what I said.
This thread, and the dozens of other threads requesting this, are about making the volatile memory less volatile. Instead of deleting it from memory as soon as the job is completed or terminated, hold onto it so that subsequent jobs can be processed from the same data.
Deleting the local data immediately was a conscious decision. The 100mb or so of onboard storage is what it is - it won’t be a job/motion plan repository, but that doesn’t mean that it has to release the data immediately.
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Something I have been curious on and have l no idea about, what would the pass throughout software experience be like if was all having to be done locally? The pass through has always been a key unique item about glowforge
There’s no way for the GF to process the lid camera data locally with its current architecture.
Yeah that’s a fine point. Also each step of a passthrough job is a whole set of instructions to the GF that is unique to the orientation and how much you pulled your material through. You would never want to re-run those, it would be all dorked up.
Not to mention the size of the onboard memory and trying to store all the stages of a passthrough. Even if you wanted to store all the passthrough stages locally… I’m sure it has a good bit of memory cushion for a single complex stage, but ten stages? 20? When I made my fifty foot long stencil it was a lot of stages.
I’m sure this has nothing to with storage. What would it mean to run the same job again? It would obviously have to be in the same exact place. Which means you have to change the material. Which means you’ve opened the lid, and now you could have anything in there. So they need to measure focus again. Which means they need to re-process the job.
“Trust me, I know what I’m doing” just isn’t part of the Glowforge software design philosophy.
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