Fire scare. How would you handle it? Or how are you prepared for it?

This afternoon my GF and I were just getting home from lunch as smoke was pouring out of our neighbors balcony doors. My first thought was do they need help and/or are they aware of this situation, my second was we need to get the dogs and the third was getting anything that I could in a hurry.

As we ran upstairs our neighbors from across the hall were heading out with their cat and told us to get our pets safe. Smoke was already filling the hallway from their door. Our apt was smoke free so far and my gf had let our dogs out of their kennels. I took one and she took the other.

With dog leash in hand I hand I grabbed laptops, ipads and hard drives to stuff in my nearby backpack. I didn't think the fire was going to spread far but you never know. I asked myself how much time I can take and what things had the most important files on them. I have my entire career backed up on these drives + photos and who knows what else. I do have dropbox but that only gets me so much. Anyways I managed to pick up four laptops two iPads and unknown quantity of drives and hoped I got the bare minimum of data. I wasn't concerned with my homelab data too much as mostly it's experimental data.

I took the dog and backpack and headed out into the hallway which had way more smoke than before. It was a bit hard to see but was manageable. We got outside and the fire dept arrived after a short time.

The smoke was getting worse and I actually started to wonder if this was going to actually spread farther than just their apt. But the fire crew got the situation under control.

I was in a similar situation about 7ish Years ago when renting a house with some roommates. Our neighbors garage had caught fire. And almost burned down our house. The fire dept managed to put that out just before that point. The back of our house had some damage and also melted the power and comcast lines leading to our house. This first event made me realize that I needed a offsite backup solution. At the time there wasn't a lot of options for backing up large quantities of data. I didn't have a homelab either.

I had thought it was unlikely for the same thing to happen twice and just justifies my need to prepare for these scenarios better, but that first event stuck in my mind which I think lead to my ability to grab the important things quickly. I just wonder what if my homelab data were more important. I could yank most of the drives. Maybe that's fine. I haven't tested that in reality. Another thing I realized was we were just coming home. What if we spent a little longer gone and the fire was worse. Our dogs would of course be the first concern. The second would be the potential data loss. We would have probably not known about it till it was too late. It makes me wonder what kind of home automation I can add to be notified if there is something happening. I know server rooms often report a status periodically through phone calls (last I was a witness anyways. Maybe this has improved a good deal since then) I don't like how most home automation gets handled by a third party servers. I could probably Arduino something if there isn't a solution available. I dunno. It's something I need to think about.

Luckily everyone is fine and the neighbors apt is better off than I expected. From what I heard it's mostly cosmetic damage in their apt. They were able to return to it. It seemed a lot worse than it was.

So that leads me to ask you guys here what you have as a plan?Or do you have any stories? Or ideas anyone has to prevent data loss in a situation like this. What kind of offsite backup options are there. Are they affordable? I also like to prepare for the idea that what if one day I can't pay the subscription of a data backup service? What do companies do now that dat tapes seem pretty out of date?

Thanks for the input!

Oh btw... Here's a pic of what caused the fire