Remote Access for editing

Azuregeist · March 7, 2019

Hello fellow LTT members. I may start a new job for my uncle editing videos for his local news station. Once I am comfortable learning how to edit using Vegas and Photoshop, he would like me to work from home and edit from here instead of commuting to his local office. The big downside is I would need to be able to access the local hard drive to be able to edit from from home and the harddrive is attached to his main computer that he lets other workers access over their local LAN. This hdd is not NAS server/drive. Is there any safe way to remotely access this drive only? I suggested teamviewer but I don't want to be able to take over his computer but just access that hdd to edit and upload to in real time. I have no idea on where to begin or if I just need to get him to get a NAS box and go from there. I don't think he really wants to spend a lot of money of course either. Thanks for any help or guidance that you can give me.

Admiral Koba · March 7, 2019

You could use a localized VPN solution on the PC (SoftEther/Hamachi) for you to connect through and then access the drive using the traditional methods. Alternatively, you could use a FTP server and only allow certain IP addresses with the correct credentials to access it.

Neither of these are a perfect solution but they are relatively inexpensive and will solve your issue in the short term at least.

Azuregeist · March 7, 2019

Is looking into a NAS device a better long term solution as well for both security and speed? That would eliminate the just directly accessing his pc which could be vulnerable with remote access. How hard would it be to setup a vpn solution on his machine, would I be installing a server client on his machine and the client machine on my own? I know general vpn speed like PIA or others tend to be rather limited and slow and uploading like gig files over a vpn solution like mentioned above, would that take hours or is it rather decently fast where my upload could be saturated and used to its fullest?

mynameisjuan · March 8, 2019

4 hours ago, Azuregeist said:

Is looking into a NAS device a better long term solution as well for both security and speed? That would eliminate the just directly accessing his pc which could be vulnerable with remote access. How hard would it be to setup a vpn solution on his machine, would I be installing a server client on his machine and the client machine on my own? I know general vpn speed like PIA or others tend to be rather limited and slow and uploading like gig files over a vpn solution like mentioned above, would that take hours or is it rather decently fast where my upload could be saturated and used to its fullest?

VPNs like PIA are for a different purposes.

VPN to your coworkers connection speeds would be limited to your and his internet and the routers in-between. Basically you are creating a Virtual Private LAN with your coworker. Setup for people not familiar with networking can be a challenge just to understand what you need to do and change.

As a post above Hamchi is the plug and play version of a VPN but speed wise and security wise there are better solutions. Its all about how deep you want to go with this as if you want to do it right you can do it for $200 with some VPN routers which are essentially plug in and enter numbers here and there and you are off.