Need Setup Suggestion for Small Office Server

[ijoin]

Hi,

New to LTT Forum and this is my first thread

So, I am looking for suggestion how to build a small office server

The requirements are :

1. As cheap and efficient possible ( yeah, we are just a new startup without funding, lol)

2. The server will be used to store works data like spreadsheet, PDFs, invoices data, etc, so all the clients pc will pull the data from the server whenever my employees work on them (is this practice good enough or you guys have other suggestion?)

3. Auto backup to other drive maybe, so incase of failures we still have a backup, or maybe we can restore the data if one of the employees did something wrong with the files

 

So, any suggestions for the best practices?

Thanks

[LukeLinusFanFic]

Hmm. All these things generally don't take a lot of space. Have you considered cloud storage instead? 

[NelizMastr]

Best practice is to buy, not to build. Get an entry level server like the HP Proliant Microserver, put 16GB of RAM in it and a bunch of SATA HDDs and you're set. Use software you're comfortable with to provide the shared folders for data and backup. Also use external USB HDDs to backup the data regularly.

[soulreaper11207]

Could slap together a Ubuntu server loaded with webmin and urBackup with a few TB of space for back ups and file sharing. This set up can even do file sharing, VoIP, VPN, and other enterprise level stuffs. I am just running this on an older Insprion 1500, Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-4510U CPU @ 2.00GHz, 4 cores, 8 gb of ram, and 6 tb of drives sitting in an external bay over USB 3.1. Servers don't needs to be expensive or massive for small to medium companies, and you really dont have to bow down to Microsoft to run it all. And hell you could run a whole Ubuntu environment to cut the cost of any of your machines to just hardware. I mean that if you don't need anything that's locked to a Windows environment. But there are ways around said hurdles. 

[ijoin]

12 hours ago, soulreaper11207 said:

Could slap together a Ubuntu server loaded with webmin and urBackup with a few TB of space for back ups and file sharing. This set up can even do file sharing, VoIP, VPN, and other enterprise level stuffs. I am just running this on an older Insprion 1500, Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-4510U CPU @ 2.00GHz, 4 cores, 8 gb of ram, and 6 tb of drives sitting in an external bay over USB 3.1. Servers don't needs to be expensive or massive for small to medium companies, and you really dont have to bow down to Microsoft to run it all. And hell you could run a whole Ubuntu environment to cut the cost of any of your machines to just hardware. I mean that if you don't need anything that's locked to a Windows environment. But there are ways around said hurdles. 

Yes, thanks for the suggestion

Used Ubuntu Server with webmin before, but too much husle

But still, thanks

16 hours ago, NelizMastr said:

Best practice is to buy, not to build. Get an entry level server like the HP Proliant Microserver, put 16GB of RAM in it and a bunch of SATA HDDs and you're set. Use software you're comfortable with to provide the shared folders for data and backup. Also use external USB HDDs to backup the data regularly.

yes, we are buying a new, not building

Do you have any suggestion for 'must use' software?

I need one to sync from the employee's pc to server

 

17 hours ago, SwagMaestro said:

Hmm. All these things generally don't take a lot of space. Have you considered cloud storage instead? 

there are also other files which will occupy lot of storages, some of our client's files