[SOLVED] Need Setup Suggestion for Small Office Server

[ijoin]

Hi,

So, I am looking for suggestion how to build a small office server
The requirements are :

1. As cheap and efficient possible ( yeah, we are just a new startup without funding and broke as hell, lol)
2. The server will be used to store works data like spreadsheet, PDFs, invoices data, etc, so all the clients pc will pull the data from the server whenever the employees work on them (is this practice good enough or you guys have other suggestion?)
3. Auto backup to other drive maybe, so incase of failures we still have a backup, or maybe we can restore the data if one of the employees did something wrong with the files

So, any suggestions for the best practices?
Thanks

 

[kanewolf]

How much space do you believe you will need for the next 2 years? You can use a 2 drive commercial NAS from Synology, QNAP, or Thecus. Create the primary storage as RAID1 to provide disk failure reliability. Then connect a USB3 external disk for backups. Get two USB drives and rotate them between work and an off-site location. That way you have a backup that is safe from theft, fire, water, etc. If you have high bandwidth internet UPLOAD, then cloud backups are also an option.

 

[ijoin]

How much space do you believe you will need for the next 2 years? You can use a 2 drive commercial NAS from Synology, QNAP, or Thecus. Create the primary storage as RAID1 to provide disk failure reliability. Then connect a USB3 external disk for backups. Get two USB drives and rotate them between work and an off-site location. That way you have a backup that is safe from theft, fire, water, etc. If you have high bandwidth internet UPLOAD, then cloud backups are also an option.

Approximately only 4 TB for next 2 years, it's small in size

So it's better to use NAS than to build/buy a server?
Do you have any suggestion for the software?

Thanks!

 

[ohiou_grad_2006]

Also, you can look on Amazon, quite a few places on there selling refurbished servers. A downside is you'd have to purchase Windows server. Which could cost a bit. So a nas might be your economic route for now. You might look into a cloud based service like Google drive or Dropbox for backup also, just in case heaven forbid your building caught fire or something.

 

[kanewolf]

Approximately only 4 TB for next 2 years, it's small in size

So it's better to use NAS than to build/buy a server?
Do you have any suggestion for the software?

Thanks!

IMO, a NAS is a much faster, and simpler implementation. The embedded software takes care of all typical needs. For example, look at the page for the DSM software on the Synology NAS hosts -- https://www.synology.com/en-us/dsm You may not need any other software.