Home Office Data Storage Query

KingPuck

Hi all,

I am tearing my hair out at the moment with the setup in our small office. We have two desktop computers (1 vista, 1 XP) a HP network printer and a small HP 3in1 printer, copier fax (USB).
I have also a wireless connection in the house (separate building from the office).

Trouble is, until recently it was just me in the office, sending quotes, invoices etc. We now have a second person in the office and much of the information I have on my computer is required by the other computer. To add to this, going forward, we would need to be able to access this information remotely on a computer in another office.

My thinking is that I need to store all the data on a network hard drive of some description. Can anyone point me in the right direction in terms of costs equipment needed and level of difficulty. I was hoping to be able to do it myself...am I being optimistic?

The second issue I have is data backup. What is the most effective way of backing up data on a daily/ weekly basis automatically?

unnameduser

Kingpuck,

You are not being optimistic by thinking you can set this up yourself.
To start and keep costs down, you could setup a Network drive such as this.

Regarding data backup, online data backup is the best method but lots of small offices choose to save €€€ by backing up to external drives / tapes and keep a copy offsite.

Ideally with sharing files and setting up remote access you would go down the route of setting up a file server and also set up remote access on that server via VPN. However the setup difficulty and cost rises quite a bit.

FusionNet

Hi there,

What we find is in SME's we are removing servers and installing a NAS. These range in price depending on the data storage required. In two networks recently where the clients SBS servers were causing awful problems and having disk errors we were able to take all the info and centrally store it on the NAS. We then installed some Netgear adsl router furewall boxes and set up VPN clients on the required laptops. As far as back up, go tape drive on an exisiting PC and take the tapes away and store in a media safe which is fire rated. Everyone thinks the important thing in a business is to back up. this is not totally true. YES its important to back up but the restore is even more important. Pick the wrong back up and to do a proper restore after a major hardware failure could cost a lot of money.

All this you can do yourself but to make it secure and to set it up right you might be better off getting a little help. We use all netgear NAS's and Switches due to there lower price but good relability and performance.

Gavin

Are tapes still used ? The cost of tape versus hard drive has changed so much recently, I'd imagine that utilizing an external usb hard drive is an easier and cheaper method for backup. Also prevents issues of restore if the entire dataset is merely copied. For a small business, it's likely to be small amounts of data (except if it's some sort of gfx workshop)

FusionNet

Hey Gavin,

USB hard drives are prone to getting scratches on the disk when you constantly move them. A tape is much more solid an option and there are cheap enough. Id be slow to advise a USB disk unless it was a one man operation. I guess it also depends on the importance of the data. A 2 man operation could have a years worth of research or product developement worth millions on storage and an office of 20 staff might not. I guess its all up to how important it is to the person. Again my opinions are always based on my experience in the field but its all down to budgets these days isnt it..

Dardania

right, i read your original post sometime yesterday, went off and replied to your post...in a different thread... doh! anyway, here is my reply, that unmaeduser & fusion have pretty much covered!:

Depending on how much you must backup you could look at using an online backup solution. Eircom broadband users get a certain gigabyte allowance for free to back up to, and if your storage needs exceed that allowance you can purchase more for something like €4.99 per month.

For sharing files a nas is a great idea, and it's definatly straightforward enough to setup yourself. You plug it into your network, it gets an IP adress, and to use it you type \\ipadress into a window explorer address bar. You mention that you only want to backup to it, but maybe you could consider working from it?
Things to consider with a nas:
can you password protect certain folders?
power consumption
noise if it's in an office
can you plug a USB printer into to share the printer on the network
can you securely access the files online remotely over the Internet (my maxtor central axis has this functionality and it's been useful a few times)

zekiel

If its only two machines why not just use a service like dropbox its simple and you get 2gb of storage free to start with. the client also supports lan sync so your files will sync across the network while also uploading offsite.