Server/ storage solution for small business

Mentorofmo · May 26, 2020

Hi there, apologies for asking a rather long series of questions in my first post!

Long time LTT viewer, and tech comfortable, but certainly not an expert in this field at all.

I have a small (non-tech) business that I run with a partner in the UK. We are based in two locations, several hundred miles apart, and are the only employees.

Currently, we run MacBook Pros, host our data on dropbox, and both independently back up using time machine onto two individual mycloud homes.

I want to change this set up because I don't trust dropbox (albeit its functionality is pretty good for us) and I hate the mycloud/ time machine combo.

I have reliable 70down/20up internet connection at my location, my partner's connection is more like 25/5 and a little less reliable.

We need:

Shared access to files that we regularly work on together (i.e. we will regularly be working on the same file as each other at the same time)

Remote access for both of us when not at our bases, and potential to give an employee remote access at a later date.

Appropriate back up.

We don't need a lot of primary storage- only currently have 300gb and I can't imagine it will ever get about 2TB in our current set up. We work with small files- 50mb max.

I had been working towards the following set up:

2x identical 2 bay NAS- one at each location with identical data and 1 primary HDD and 1 backup HDD . These would be connected using appropriate file server/ syncing software. It seems like Synology offer pretty good hardware and software solutions for this, but need to dig into that more. I'd then run a daily online backup location tbc.

Does this sound like a sensible solution? Would greatly welcome any views/ criticisms.

Mr Water · May 27, 2020

Just a simple off the shelf nas, and a decent size SSD/HDD will do you fine.
Setup one at both of your houses, and setup your mates as a nightly backup (due to bandwidth)
Synology has an excellent setup process, and Linus has made a great video on this.

NelizMastr · May 27, 2020

If you want remote access to the files, I'd also recommend implementing a VPN server on said Synology NAS. There is native support for L2TP/IPSEC and OpenVPN which are both usable on Mac and PC. For OpenVPN, install the Tunnelblick client, L2TP is built into the system preferences > network section.

You can all access the NAS like it's on your own network via IP or DNS name. Discovery in the Finder is hit and miss. Connecting directly via afp or smb via CMD+K should be 100% reliable.