Hey guys, this might be a problem you've encountered at your workplace, but I need some advice. I work on a small creative team for a large-scale non-profit in South Carolina. We've been serving our area for over 30 years, have launched 3 campuses, and serve over 3,000 people weekly across all 3 locations. Not only do I do creative work (Motion Designer and Editor), but I also facilitate broadcast video for all locations, and am the sole support for our (frankly non-existent) IT department. With that out of the way, here's the problem: We're in Hard Drive Hell. Meaning the way we do data management is that we store everything on external hard drives (cheap ones at that). Here's a brief description of our structure.
Each staff member has a work-issued computer, whether it's a laptop or desktop. For the creative team, we have what we call "Working Drives" which are 2TB Samsung T7s, and a backup drive which is a 2TB WD MyPassport. We (try to) back up our files every day to the backup drives but it doesn't always work out. Other staff work off of the internal drives in their computers, with occasional files in Google Drive. Speaking of Google Drive, that's how the creative team delivers files to each campus' broadcast team for service, and the band uses DropBox to sync click track and Ableton Live files.
My dept manager (Creative) says that she wants to get more hard drives and label them with what year/projects are on them, but not attach them to the network. That's frustrating to me because we'll keep running into the same problems (no one backing up, file structures not being the same, etc). And if they get damaged, yes there is 1 other backup, but life happens.
The structure I'm trying to pitch is a working SSD server that backs up to an HDD server, which then automatically backs up to a cloud backup service like AWS or BackBlaze. So as follows: SSD Server > HDD Server > Cloud. If we had some IT infrastructure, I feel like a lot of our problems would be alleviated. Another issue is that we don't have an MDM solution, but that is one we are actively pursuing.
The main problem is that we've had drives disappear, no one knows who does what in Google Drive, and no one person has the same copy of a project as someone else. I've been trying to tell them to get a Server/NAS for some time now, but every time I make a case I get shot down because of cost, even though I know money isn't an issue. How do I convince my organization's leadership that even though it's a massive expense now, it will save headaches for everyone for the next several years?