[toby]

Been there, cursed about that, now happily using buckets. As the saying goes "There are two kinds of glass carboy users; those that have dropped one, and those who will.".

That sort of thing is why I will never drop one.  I do know several people that did have major mishaps (including one that required a lot of stitches), so I switched to better bottles years ago.  My reason for those over buckets is the ease of seeing what's going on.  I use brew haulers with them to make lifting and carrying properly a bit easier than some sort of hugging method.

[beersk]

Been there, cursed about that, now happily using buckets. As the saying goes "There are two kinds of glass carboy users; those that have dropped one, and those who will.".

Ha, well, I'm sure it's possible. I was VERY careful. I have a friend who uses carboys and does not (ever) take them out of their milk crate he carries them in.
I switched from carboys to kegs, and lately I've been using buckets because my batch size went up a tad to where kegs are too small. The whole spigot thing isn't that big of a deal, I love the auto siphon and have an extra as a back up. Doing a closed transfer with keg fermenters is really nice though. Kind of wish I had 3 gallon kegs and fermented smaller batches in my kegs, or could brew and split 6 gallon batches with different yeast. Perhaps I'll move to that some day.