Small office setup server advice needed

stateofflux

Hello,

I need some advice on whether to buy a cheap server machine with RAID .

we are a small company.

5 inhouse staff and 4 salespeople in the field


In the office we have 5 desktops all running windows 7 pro. i am using an old dell optiplex 3030 machine as file server just using the workgroup so other desktops can access it.

Now the issue i have is that the we use dropbox pro as a backup sync of this optiplex and the 4 sales people in the field upload their surveys and other stuff to this same dropbox which then syncs back down to the optiplex. so a 2 way sync.

I am concerned about the following:

The optiplex breaking down as its on for days on end.

Dropbox software is on the optiplex, contantly syncing up and down to cloud so if that drive is damaged and gets wiped , everything on the cloud will get wiped too.

Any advice appreciated.

mada82

How about a nightly backup up to an external hard drive?

Firewalkwithme

Your Dropbox cloud storage won't get wiped if the Optiplex goes down. You just set up another machine and login to the DropBox client and all your data will sync.

Do you use Office 365?

stateofflux

Cartoon_Head wrote: »

Your Dropbox cloud storage won't get wiped if the Optiplex goes down. You just set up another machine and login to the DropBox client and all your data will sync.

Do you use Office 365?

Thanks for the advice.
Yes, we use office 365 for email.

Would a lower end server be necessary just for the more durable hardware alone given that the optiplex is on for days on end ?. Also Would a RAID option be overkill here.

I manually backup the Optiplex every week to an external drive

Thanks again

Firewalkwithme

I just have a couple of questions to get a better picture of what you have and need, I want to be able to give you advice that can leverage your existing resources as effectively as possible.

What Office 365 plan are you on? Is it Exchange only?

How much data are storing?

Going for a full RAID server option might be more expensive that necessary.

stateofflux

Cartoon_Head wrote: »

I just have a couple of questions to get a better picture of what you have and need, I want to be able to give you advice that can leverage your existing resources as effectively as possible.

What Office 365 plan are you on? Is it Exchange only?

How much data are storing?

Going for a full RAID server option might be more expensive that necessary.

We are on the E1 licence i think which has exchange, sharepoint and a few other things

The data is currently around 400gb of the optiplex 500gb drive.

This will rise fast as the sales team survey sites and take lots of photos and upload them to dropbox from their phones

Firewalkwithme

Ok so if you are on the E1 licence that would mean you have a lot of cloud storage that you might not be making use of, e.g OneDrive which provides 1 TB per user. It would be nice to make some use of that in your planning.

I get the impression that cost is a concern to you so let's work on that basis.

Let's assume you upgrade your file server but stay with the workgroup model to avoid server licencing costs. That means getting a decent spec machine with a fast hard drive. Take RAID out of the picture for now. get yourself a big external drive and use Easus Todo Backup Free, you can have it handle full / incremental / differential backups for you. Allow it to run the incremental / differential several times per day.

What you can also have it do is backup your server to one of those lovely OneDrive accounts that you don't seem to be using. Just set the OneDrive folder as the backup destination.

Since you have OneDrive, why also pay for DropBox? Tranfer everything over to it and save a fair chunk of money off your DropBox subscription.

You can also run Easus ToDo on each of your clients so that their machines are being backed up to OneDrive.

stateofflux

Thanks a million for the advice, really appreciate it.

That external hard drive with Easus Todo sounds like the way to go.

All the 4 sales people are not tech savvy. the dropbox app on their phone has been a godsend as they can simply upload survey photos almost instantly which can viewed almost instantly by our team in the office as it sync back down to the optiplex (this is a critical requirement for the business as we work to deadlines).

we had a nightmare with the onedrive client and syncing errors before (although this was nearly 2 years ago). but ill give it a go again as a backup for the Optiplex and for all the sales teams PC's

Firewalkwithme

No problem.

As with any backup system, be careful to check all the settings, understand what they mean and test them.

One thing to watch out for when using OneDrive for backups is that it has a file size limit of 10GB. Easus joins all the files into one compressed file which will obviously be much larger than 10GB so to avoid any issues there, look for the option that allows you to split the size of the files. There are some standard sizes already built in, CD, DVD etc. Just choose something that will keep each chunk of the backup under 10GB.

It might be worth looking at Google Photos. You can get unlimited photo storage with them. As soon as you take a photo it uploads to the cloud and is accessible from any device. No manual intervention is needed.

Eire Go Brach

Do things properly. I'd go with a NAS or look at Azure for backup or a server. I don't think you should buy a physical server.

gearoid!

You can make one of your five Desktop as a workstations and a file server, load Dropbox and attach a bigger hdd and make that the Dropbox repo.

If you want a dedicated machine as a file server with Dropbox functionality, you might want to consider "raspberry pi as file server". If you slap that phrase in Google search, you'll find helpful articles. If you don't have time to do the setup, there are sellers in Fiverr than can set it up for you remotely.

Also, you could use one of NAS storage devices offered on the market today. You can search for it using "nas with dropbox".

satguy

With broadband getting faster and faster, the cloud is a real option ( dropbox, one drive or others ).

But just adding some nice 2TB WD Blacks to one of your office PC's can make a great and easy to access storage device/server.
You could build a fine PC with a good PSU and an 8 core CPU for €300 or so, with good fans and air flow it could run for years non stop.