My home was burglarized once and among all the serious stuff that they took they also took: tortillas, salsa, ground beef, and cheddar cheese. I still can't believe that.

The first time my home was robbed (while I was sleeping upstairs), the perpetrators did a whole bunch of bizarre things, like taking a jar of pickles out of the fridge and leaving them on the front porch and taking the laundry detergent from our laundry room and pouring it out in the back yard.

In an unrelated story, I happened to be moving out of that apartment the same day. And the very next day my new apartment also got robbed.

Remind me not to rent in your neighborhood ;-)

> In an unrelated story, I happened to be moving out of that apartment the same day. And the very next day my new apartment also got robbed.

Maybe the thief forgot to take something?

First time I got robbed, they took my CD player, moved my stack of CDs, but left them all there! Way to insult my music tastes.

They also stole my dinner suit. Which I had bought the week before, worn to a party, soaked with my dance sweat, and not yet cleaned. Insurance repaid me the full value of the suit, so essentially I got a "free suit rental" out of the experience.

(Plus the cost of new bars on all my windows. And the experience six months later of, presumably, interrupting the same guy trying to climb in my bathroom window at dinner time. Thankfully he never returned after that.)

Yep, when I was burgled, alongside a MacBook, watch and my freakin' backups, which were on a separate drive on a nearby bookcase, they also took some bath soap and a bottle of dessert wine that my gf and I brought back from France specially. I hope they choked on the wine.

That said, I also had they keys to brand new Audi on the kitchen counter (I used to be a car journalist and it was a press test car) and they completely missed them. So, I got off lightly, in some respects, even if the loss of backups is still something that pisses me off today.

I've learned my mistake about backup drives now and do it over wifi to a drive in secret ___location witheld.

From someone who had building burn down: back up to offsite locations, ideally off-state, ideally off-continent, over the Internet, and CHECK YOUR RESTORE PROCEDURE PERIODICALLY. A wifi backup to a time capsule hidden up in the rafters (digital rat line!) isn't going to help you if crackheads break in...and then burn your place down with an errant crackpipe.

(also, envy on the car journalism; being an equipment reviewer for stuff you really love, like cars, guns, scuba gear, computer gear, headphones, etc., would be a really fun paid hobby)

Yeah, offsite is the way to go, I think. We're due to get fibre broadband here in December, and that's when the whole lot will go up to S3 monthly if not weekly.

That said, I guess I'm talking about ~2TB of stuff (work data and personal data) -- wasn't there a thread somewhere that discussed the various options? I'm in the UK, rather than the US, and would rather keep my data in the EU

Try BackBlaze, much cheaper than S3. The data will be transferred to the US, but you can encrypt it if you are worried about that.

Encrypt locally (tarsnap, crashplan, etc.) and who cares really where the data goes (except for availability/reliability)?

I tried to use Carbonite. Nice UI, simple service. But with Comcast it was going to take about 3 months to back up 400GB -- and that was with leaving my laptop on 24/7.

To this day I'm not sure if it was Comcast or Carbonite that made the uploads so slow, but I've since had to rethink my offsite back up plans. Would love suggestions.

I use comcast business at home, and use crashplan pro for our laptop and Linux server backups.

The initial backup of my laptop (200gb since I included iTunes mp3 and 2 x 25gb vmware images) took a couple days when idle. After that the incrementals were basically unnoticed.

The internet backup option isn't really feasible for a normal home connection. With the Comcast 250gb monthly quota it would take me half a year to get all my data up.

In this case physical drives is the way to go.

I can definitely sympathise. MacBook and backup drives containing all my photos and music taken from a bookshelf. I foolishly thought it would never happen. Needless to say I now have offsite backups but it's a horrid lesson to learn. DONT take it for granted - a service like backblaze might be the best $5 you ever spend.

Oh, and they took a bottle of vodka that was 3/4 empty. These scumbags do weird things.

A jar of coins and... pajamas.

My house was robbed in college. They also took a jar of coins. Heaviest $20 ever.

As a kid, I lost an Atari Lynx to burglars, but I still feel sad about it. Last laugh was on them though, as they left the battery pack. NICE 1.5 HOUR BATTERY LIFE, YOU SCUM.

Glad I still have my Lynx. And I'm going to play some Skweek when home. Thanks for reminding me of that :-)

Enjoy! 'Twas a fine machine. :)

My 42inch tv and nothing else.