I’ve had a house fire, so a little cautious about having all my digital eggs in just one basket.
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Yeah, that argues for an off premises solution.
OTOH, how many people do you know who have had multiple house fires? It could be argued that you’re pretty much fireproof now. (Same argument I use about flying - never seen a story about anyone getting killed in their 3rd airplane crash. I figure I’m the safest guy in the world to fly with. Big iron anyway. 
️)
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My wife had 2 house fires.
EDIT: I have a coworker that had 3 house fires. (All electrical/clearly wiring issues.)
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Whoa. We need a mathematician. Those are some serious odds.
Interesting they were all electrical related. When I was a kid most house fires were caused by smoking. Times have changed a lot.
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well…assuming that person was actually unlucky enough to have three electrical fires, they’re certainly bucking the odds.
in 2015, there were “only” ~ 381k residential fires. of those, 51% were cooking accidents, 11% heating, 6.4% were electrical malfunctions, and 6.4% were unintentional / careless (assuming smoking falls into this area).
interestingly, if you look at the data covering fires with casualties (only 7500 fires), cooking only comprises 35% of the total, with 8.5% going to open flames and “other” adding up to 35%. in fatal fires (1800), smoking explicitly makes up nearly 14% of the total.
presumably these numbers do not include apartment buildings, but i couldn’t say.
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i use a mix of both. carbonite for off site and i have a NAS with 4TB in it that backs up locally. so i can access either from off site, but at home i’d restore from the NAS because it’s quicker, and carbonite is the “omg there was a fire” solution.
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The 3-2-1 concept of backs are working for you. 3 copies (original and 2 copies), backed up to 2 different types of media (USB, DVD, external HD or Online) and 1 copy is off site (Cloud or friend’s place).
We had disastrous and fatal flash flooding a few years ago (down the canyon) which totally destroyed houses and properties (including computers and external HDs).
Never enough backups.
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Lol I have 2 external HD hooked up to my work computer…one can never be too redundant…
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Totally agree. I lost a hard drive once years ago, and it hadn’t been backed up. 
So I tend to take it to an extreme now…multiple external HD backups, with duplicates off site in two locations.
(It takes a while.) 
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I used to take my extra one with me at night just in case of a fire…lol. Probably still should…or upload to my cloud account…
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HA! Yes. This definitely carries a little more gusto than the ruler. Way to stick it out—enjoy your Glowforge!
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The good thing is it really isn’t all that expensive. Carbonite is less than $60/yr for my computer and external drives are cheap as well.
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Not yet.
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Takes forever, though. I had Carbonite for a while. I actually lost some files stored there because cloud backup corrupted the encryption headers. Backup took days, as did restore. I’d be better off with drive duplication stored in a safe deposit box.
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carbonite isn’t fast, but it’s constant. For $55/yr, you can’t expect immediate. drive duplication in a safe deposit box is a lot of work to keep constantly updated. and if you aren’t swapping out drives weekly, you’re potentially missing some important data.
for me carbonite is there for catastrophic failure (i.e., the house burns down), not quick retrieval. for quick retrieval, i have on-site backup and restoration.
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Good point, though I still lost my most critical data through Carbonite.
In the past Carbonite had issues with the storage (when they would lose an internal array) that would cause a gap that needed time to rebuild. It bit people that needed the restore before the complete rebuild.
I like their Personal Pro level that allows you to create a disk image (to an external HD) as often as you like, plus backup 1 external source (HD or mapped network drive) as part of that Personal Pro level.
The next level up has additional features plus a courier service that will send you your entire backup on an external HD to restore.
i can’t speak to the encryption corruption, i haven’t seen that issue come up. that does suck.