Hey guys at my shop we have multiple storage devices and pretty much anybody who knew what the hell was up with our network is long gone or retired and forgot. We currently have a server we store 2tb worth of PDF and illustrator files on for customers. This server is running Windows 98 server edition so you know it's fairly old, slow, and on its last legs. We would like to replace it for some reasonably affordable, basically all its ram is taken up running the software on it so even backing it up to the cloud is a nightmare Second we have several smaller network drives that we backup files to or archive to. Would it be better to get another actual server to dump these files on instead of these drives? Lastly I'm looking for a network drive to just hold word docs on for PO's. I wanted to use Google docs or something cloud based but the owner is worried using Google docs won't be secure and doesn't want someone to get into our customer information. This would only be for word documents or Excel sheets and not night files but we want it easily searchable by anyone who works here. Any suggestions?
Since the PO's are small would it also just make sense to make a network folder that we can all share to instead?
Afaik its not a regulation issue, its just our internal PO's that we issue to outside vendors. It contains no personal data other than a customer identifier so we know what customer its for. Its more because of my friends/bosses paranoia of a sales rep or someone else tampering with it to get our customer list
Thats a complicated question. Really depends on the reliability and throughput you need. When I contract work the device I put in place most for small businesses is the Drobo 5N. The throughput is not great on it, but they have corporate tier support and the device is very easy for people with little tech experience to manage and upgrade storage. The drawback of the Drobo is that it is on the costly side for a small nas device, and the throughput on file transfers is not great, but it is very usable and reliable. You can throw pretty much any drives you have in it, and you can set it to have 2 disk redundancy, so you can lose up to 2 of the drives and be ok. There are several other vendors of NAS device, really depends on what your priorities are for the storage and how much your willing to spend. when looking at NAS you need to consider -redundancy -how much storage do you need for current data + at least the next 5 years -can it use disks of different sizes and model or do they have to be matched -does it need to run any applications or just be storage -how secure do you need the data to be -what does recovery look like (because something on the device will fail at some point) -any NAS needs to be on a battery backup, so if you don't have one add that to the cost, doesn't need to be fancy just any basic battery backup
Yeah I went with a network folder for now for the simple files. Unless we change our system I think we are stuck getting a new server through Kodak for their proprietary software that works with our equipment but always trying to figure out how to make things run beyter
Haven't done anything with the server or the myriad of network drives we have floating around yet. For the simple word doc file sharing I made a shared folder on a PC thats always on that the people who need access to the docs can get to