How are you sharing files in your company?

[ZooCity]

I am looking to setup the best possible way for my team to have joint access to all of our files.  I'm no IT feller but I see the options as a local server setup or cloud storage.

Cloud
Since we use Google Work for email, spreadsheet and word processing documents, we have used Google Drive for awhile but the Drive Sync client, which allows you to open and work on files on your desktop, is so riddled with major issues that Google cannot and will not resolve that we have to leave it asap.  It's doing a great amount of damage to our file organization daily by duplicating, moving and even deleting entire folders.  The payroll hours spent and the hours that will continue to be needed to clean this mess up are staggering.  Google will not even refund our user fees and has no solution to the issues, after months of us patiently working with them.   It's very disappointing and also spooking me away from cloud storage.  It seems like a common similarity with cloud apps that they are released with bugs or simply cannot function as advertised.  Only a handful of the best ones seem to be stable and functional.  The fact that Google can't do this makes me wonder if the others have the same issues.   

That said, I see both box and dropbox as possible alternatives, with box having a smooth integration to Google Apps enabling it to more seamlessly take the place of the faulty Drive Sync client, or so it seems.

Presuming another cloud service is trusty and functional I do still see a need for local backup and need to setup a routine for that as well. 

Server
For us this would be either Linux based via a Synology box or OSX server, RAID array.  It sounds a lot better to me overall but I have not experience working on a physical network.  I'm attracted to the security of having the files local and we could always add remote backup via a web service and also swap out one of the RAID drives to a safe deposit box when we run bank deposits, leaving everything backed up safely offsite. 

Curious to hear what others in our industry are using and thank in advance for the feedback.

[Gilligan]

Well swapping out 1 raid drive, depending on how your raid is setup may not help anything.  Raid 1 (with hotswap) then sure, but you are buying two drives and using 1.  Raid 5 and taking one and saving it doesn't help anything.

Not to mention it has to rebuild the entire raid each time you drop the other back in.  I'd suggest a different route.

What we recently did was put the raid 5 in a new server with more ports so I could add more drives.  I'll be running hardware raid 1 on the OS drive and software raid 5 on the storage drives.  I think have another drive in there that I'm using as a single drive backup just in case the raid 5 takes a dump on me in a catastrophic way.  Now, THIS drive you could take off site with you and have the script rsync everything back up again with the new drive at night just like it kept the other one up to date daily.  This could be done with an external drive though I have mine mounted internally.  Doesn't protect me from fire... but I'll get around to that another day.

[ZooCity]

Oh, I wasn't aware of that.  My IT dude seemed to think there was a way set up the RAID array to allow us to swap out but yes, one of the drives would be sitting in the safe dep box at all times.  Small cost for the backup I thought.

We were going to use a Synology box with or, if going OSX server, a 2009-2011 era Mac Pro with it's handy drive sleds for the drives.

[tancehughes]

We have an account with Copy, and pay $9.99/month for I think it is 200GB of storage in the cloud. All computers in our building are logged in, and we share files that way. Works really well. Box is good too, we actually have an account with them for our other company in the same facility, so that we don't confuse  the two. Long story as to why they are separate, but too much uploading and downloading bogs down our internet with all the files we have.

[ZooCity]

Anyone using a sync app on either of these?

If not, how do you work on art files- do you need to download the file, work on it, then delete the previous version and upload the file with your latest adjustments?  This sounds like the slowest way to possibly work on art files.  I have to open a crazy amount of files daily so we have always used a desktop sync client to allow this to happen just as it would normally on a desktop.

[Gilligan]

Raid 5 takes 3 or more drives and spans across them with parity bits as well.  This gives you the benefit of if you lose ONE drive you are not dead.  Things keep jugging along and you can plop in a new one and be back to "redundant".  BUT, if you lose more than one drive then you lose everything.  So if you take one drive out and put it in a box, all it is is one piece of a 3+ part puzzle and will do you absolutely ZERO good if you lose the other drives.

Raid 1 is basically a mirror.  So you COULD do it that way.  But you will have to rebuild the raid each time you drop back in the system.  This could be done before you leave for the day so it doesn't impact performance but something to think about.

So the difference in the two is that Raid 5 you could have four 3TB and get 9TB of usable storage w/ 3TB being used for parity (not counting the whole 8 bits equals a 1 byte, blah blah blah fine print).  When you do Raid 1 you have two 3TB drives and are only able to use 3TB's for storage because the rest is mirrored.

Then you can go into raid 6 and 10 and blah blah blah with other various forms of redundancy.

[ericheartsu]

we bought a dell server. i think it was $800 or so, and than we added two tb drives. Then it cost another $200 to have an IT guy come in and set it up. Pretty easy to use once we got the hang of it. Everything is saved on there, and all employees have access to it.

Works on Macs, PCS, phones, tablets, you name it.

[Gilligan]

My wife uses DropBox with all the syncing and is digging it (I believe I have mentioned it before)... we had one hiccup the other day that a file didn't sync up... went and gave the source pc a little nudge (paused and unpaused syncing) and all was well again.

[Gilligan]

we bought a dell server. i think it was $800 or so, and than we added two tb drives. Then it cost another $200 to have an IT guy come in and set it up. Pretty easy to use once we got the hang of it. Everything is saved on there, and all employees have access to it.

Works on Macs, PCS, phones, tablets, you name it.

This is our work flow, but we didn't go name brand of course.  Actually, I lie.  We are technically using a Dell... but it was a decommissioned server that was given to me and still has PLENTY of life in it for us.

So I slapped it in our closet and named it R-Kelly.

[ZooCity]

Is it just your wife using Dropbox's sync client on the desktop or do you have multiple users all using the sync client on their respective machines?

I have read up and noted that Dropbox seems to address the issues facing other sync clients in a much better way.  It will rename duplicate files to show which one is conflicting for instance.

[Gilligan]

She isn't as hardcore as you guys would be... but she has a few people with their hands in the files and they are on MANY computers as she bounces around a lot.

I wouldn't say we end up in any conflict situations though... so I can't really attest to that part.

[Admiral]

I think you were on the right track with Synology NAS.

Setup 1 or 2 hard drive fail safe, backup to a remote Synology daily.  Easy to connect to the shared folders, remotely as well via FTP.

They are pretty fast (depending on the model you go with), user friendly, easy to do the remote backups as well for very good data protection.

[ZooCity]

Agreed on the  Synology box, my IT person really prefers linux and price wise that setup seems unbeatable.  I would prefer it but need to double check that we aren't going to need OSX server for future things that are on the table.  Going OSX seems overpriced comparatively but I imagine OSX server has some very handy built in features for shops running primarily macs.

[Gilligan]

I'm not a Mac guy but I have a REAL hard time accepting their servers at almost any price.  Doesn't help that they also pass off mini mics with a USB nic as a "server" on the lower end.

Everything these servers have on them are built on the shoulders (sometimes directly using) the mainstays of the Linux platform.  Rsync is your best friend in Linux backup world.  I'd be willing to bet many of these backup boxes just use rsync wrapped up or similar.

Os wise, you can't distinguish the difference between the Linux server and osx... They are built off the same platform, you pay for that name and a few custom bells and whistles that you probably could easily get around with many another solutions.

But I will be honest, I'm a slight bit of a Mac hater... I respect them, but they rub me the wrong way.

[jvanick]

I use Unison instead of Rsync... works better and is a true bi-directional replication.

I'm actually working on building a pair of linux servers right now to have a true automatic 'off-site' backup for our data...   one at the shop, one at home... building it up on CentOS 7, unison for sync, samba for windoze file sharing, ssh for 'vpn' tunnel between home and shop.