Private cloud

[leonidasnp]

Hi guys, I could really use Your help!

 

My father owns a small engineering business and although he has his "professional" tech support, I sometimes try to help him with some simple stuff, but now, I need help from the tech community.

 

He has really important data on his computers (6 PCs and 2 laptops) that he wishes to secure, but also to have constant access to whenever he needs. I was a bit inspired by Linus's petabyte project, even though I do not need this crazy amount of storage. 

 

So here is what I need/want. I would like to have a computer/cloud/server that I could access remotely, not only on the same wifi network but also from home. Capacity should be somewhere between 3 and 10 TB, possibly upgradeable when needed. I would like to grant access to all files for his employees if they need to finish or check something from home, whether on their PCs or mobile phones. He mostly has .dwg files, but also pdf, word, excel, etc.

 

Is there any way that I could grant temporary access to his clients, but only to data regarding their project?

 

In the end, since those are really important files, basically all of the business is on the drives, there should be a daily backup. I thought of some kind of mirror HDD that would automatically update every day at let's say 9 pm.

 

I understand there is a possibility of using google drive or similar cloud services, but he would like to own all his hardware. On the other hand, he wants to surpass any major providers.

 

I hope I explained everything and that my wishes are possible.

 

Thanks in advance,

leonidasnp

[Lurick]

QNAP or Synology perhaps?

They have cloud software and you can put access lists on the folders and files to permit or deny access based on the user.

[jkirkcaldy]

Depending on how deep you wanted to go you could look into something like nextcloud. This is a self hosted alternative to dropbox/google drive. It installs on top of a linux OS so you would likely need a server to run it on. Although you could run it on a low power Nuc and run the storage on a nas device but that may be complicating things.

 

You can share links or emails with documents with passwords and download expiration dates. You can give each employee a user account and share files internally between users. You can also integrate open source office software to let people edit word documents etc online.

 

A word of warning though, this can be a very involved process and if you install it - as with anything you install - you become the tech support for it. So if it ever goes down, you will probably have to fix it.

[newgeneral10]

I personally like FreeNas.  It is a very stable OS built for storage servers.  It even has a NextCloud plugin.  I have a domain name registered to mine so it is accessible anywhere.  If you are worried about sensitive data then you can set up SSL with NextCloud and encrypted data pools in FreeNas (even though this is quite advanced and you could seriously screw things up).  FreeNas also has plenty of nice to haves like good compression and deduplication built in.