Computer system

[TCT]

What kind of computer systems are people using? Currently we have 7 computers(running Win7) connected through a network, 4 network printers and 2 NAS's. We end up saving artwork in a few places, only 1 place(and a backup) for FINAL artwork. Our shop management software(PriceIt) is hosted on my computer and networked to the others.

What we have "works" but I keep thinking there is a better way. I am not a super computer guy, I do build the computers we have, but I have no concept of a server. Are a lot of people running of a server?  How does that work? What are the advantages?

[abchung]

Backing up data.
I know this guy who is a computer tech, one of his client got a pretty nasty virus. Now I am quite concern and am thinking of backing all my data on a cloud.

http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/virus-removal/cryptowall-ransomware-information

[Gilligan]

Yeah, ransom ware /crypto virus is no joke.  I've seen ppl fork out good money to get their data back.  It always originates to opening something they shouldn't have.

Google drive or drop box (we use both, but pay only for g drive. Is nice to have essentially a dfs (distributed file system), as they sync the files between all the pc's.  Bad thing is it does nothing to keep the crypto from syncing up as well.  No drop box has history of the files so that would help, also help if you mess up an art file and save over it losing the better/original work.  I'm not sure if google has this, I need to look.

That said, we also use a raid 3, but in all honesty, it's down right now because the boot drive took a crap on me... At least I think that's all... Haven't had the time to really dig in and see.  This is a fairly easy fix for me, but might not be for those that aren't the computer nerd that I am.

I'd say that a combination of could storage like drop box or google drive with either another off site back up that runs over night or at least something that something like crypto can't spread easily and infect.  This gets your files at least backed up from the day before.

Usual recipe I do for my clients is weekly FULL backup sometime over the weekend (this overwrites the previous weeks full backup) and then incremental backups daily (this backs up only what has changed since the full). Then on the 1st of each month we do a FULL permanent and keep that forever.  As space fills up we off load those to long term storage.  This is just a base, we tweak from there based on particular clients needs.  Example full backups with you guys might get pretty large and hard to justify keeping month after month perm backups. The main benefit is that sometimes you don't realize something disappeared or got current till months later when you need that file again and these perm backups are nice to dig back into.

It's all a delicate balance, but you don't want to be like my buddy with a multi-disc array of 7 gigs of data and one drive takes a dump and his back up has corrupt folders.... He's now looking at $2,400 bucks to get those drives back in order.

[ericheartsu]

this is exactly what i'm looking at right now.

Alot of people have recommended the Synology NAS drives

[mimosatexas]

No one right answer to this as the size of your shop and volume of data will determine the right approach.  as a small shop where i do basically everything related to data, Google Drive is amazing. It has built in versioning so if you mess up a file or get a virus you can restore an older version. Its dirt cheap. I can access everything from home, my shop, my phone, anywhere. It integrates with gmail which i use for my email. Really nothing else comes close.

I also have a few fire proof waterproof drop proof external drives that i do incremental backups on. One lives in my truck one at home.

[GraphicDisorder]

For us cloud would not work with the amount of data we create vs upload speed here I wouldn't think (several gbs per day).  We also don't trust any servers to be our "only" copy.  So for our shop each computer has its own OS drive, secondary data drive, external drive copying the data drive, then our server copying each computers OS and Data drive each night.  Also at intervals I bring in a offsite drive and copy each computer and take it home. 

We just had our Synology box have a exploit that caused some data issues and someone was even mining bit coin on it.  But we've updated and fixed that and its doing its job again.  But even when I had to start over fresh on that server we lost nothing since each computer still has all it's data.  Over kill maybe some would say but data is pretty important to us since we create most of the artwork we print/embroider.

[3Deep]

Agree with brandt, I don't trust the cloud I like to back all my files up on our four machines even have one for stand by