Drobo's are for chumps? I lost terabytes of data on ours and Drobo wouldn't help at all. - Ethan Kaplan

Does your state have a use tax? - Morton Fox

What do you think of your drobo? - Alex Haar

How'd you lose it on a drobo? - Joel Tanner

I love my drobos, I've got four. I've never lost any data on any of them. How did you lose the data Ethan? - Thomas Hawk

I won't buy from any retailer online that charges me sales tax. I've never once found the after tax price cheaper ever. - Thomas Hawk

I'll pay tax if the deal is right. Bought something from an in-state seller on ebay the other day. They had the best price - even with shipping and tax. It just arrived. The next best deal was out of China. It would have cost more with shipping and taken two weeks to get here. A no-brainer. - Julie Barrett

http://www.boe.ca.gov/sutax... You generally owe California use tax when you use, consume, give away or store tangible personal property (i.e., products you can see, weigh, feel or touch, such as clothing, books, computers, DVDs or CDs) in California that you purchased from an out-of-state vendor. If the out-of-state vendor does not collect the California tax on your purchase, you must pay the tax. - David Thomas

I'll order from Amazon even if tax pushes the cost a little higher than elsewhere. Prime, the convenience of dealing with a trusted party and having easy access to all my records in one place is worth a few bucks to me. - felix

Aren't you technically supposed to pay that sales tax when filing yearly tax returns? - Pras Sarkar

wow, David. I had no idea that you still are supposed to pay tax on stuff you order without sales tax. That's wild. I bet hardly anyone pays that tax. How do they keep track of all of that? - Thomas Hawk

It's simply a question of who has the lowest bottom line price, and that includes tax and shipping. On rare occasions, it's still cheaper than anywhere else even with those included. - Eric P

They don't keep track of it, it's on the honor system. Can't believe no sales-tax on the net has lasted this long. I think it will come to an end, soon. - Jake Rome

Ethan: I'm also curious as to how you lost terabytes of data from a Drobo. Did you have multiple concurrent drive failures? I <3 my Drobo. - Mitch

I bet 99% of people don't pay sales tax on out of state purchases. - Thomas Hawk

I've had individual drives fail on my drobos. Usually I just pop out the bad drive and insert a new good drive in and the drobo heals itself. I've never lost more than one drive at a time. - Thomas Hawk

Simple rule of thumb with data.... Always have it in three places at any given time. - Joel Tanner

@THawk: Yeah I think unless you lost your drobo in a fire or something, about the only way you could lose data is from a major device malfunction. It seems unlikely that two drives would fail at the same time. - Mitch

A drobo isn't, in of itself, a backup solution. It protects against one particular kind of failure. It's not a substitute for redundant copies on different physical devices (and a drobo only counts as one device). The drobo can fail. The operating system can corrupt the data on it. The house can burn down. Etc. - Eric P

But without sales taxes, it would be impossible for local governments to pay for their cruises. Like here in Virginia where everything...everything is taxed! - Mike Lewis from twhirl

I've had my Drobo for the last year, and so far, so great. Need to pick up another drive for it to round out to 2 TB. Excellent backup solution. - Susan Dennis

I tend to agree that most people don't pay use tax. In most states, you are supposed to self-report as part of your income tax return. I'm a tax lawyer, so my "I didn't know" argument would be met with some skepticism, so I pay. - David Thomas