@ihermit2: They’ll be stored in Google’s cloud servers using industry standard security precautions. That said, nothing is perfectly secure. If you’re not comfortable transmitting your designs over the internet (e.g. using Dropbox, emailing them to people), you wouldn’t want to use Glowforge either. As much as we’d like to have you as a customer, it’s more important to us that you make the right choice about a product that’s a good fit. There are some terrific offline lasers; as an example, I’ve personally used Epilog’s, and would recommend them if that’s a requirement for you (or anyone else with that need).
That said, I will note that we consider our designs extremely confidential and proprietary, and are very comfortable hosting them on our servers.
@simon: We’re willing to do some work to provide an escape shuttle for owners if something happens to us, but every bit of engineering on this comes at the expense of features and development elsewhere. We may be wrong about this, but we think the biggest opportunity to bring the Glowforge capabilities to the world is when the device is connected to the cloud. We’re going to prioritize putting our resources there. I would love to help you with this but I want to be honest about where our priorities are so you can decide if we’re going to be a good fit for your needs.
@brandon - well put, although the office is a big focus for us as well.
@alexslonimer - we have a “plans area” where we store your designs so you can easily re-print them again. As someone who actually uses this all the time, I can tell you it’s awesome! You can also delete plans that you’re done with, of course.