Hi all,

I am being looked at to find a way to store some information centrally. I could go down the route of getting some sort of NAS/file server and using something like SMB/CIFS to share out data among some PCs in the office, but then I'd probably want some VPN stuff to access said data from outside the office too...

I've been looking at Dropbox, but 100GB isn't enough...We are about to log about five hours worth of data, which ends up at around 10GB. Other data is probably growing at around 1GB/week so Dropbox isn't really suitable. That said, the whole plug-in nature of Dropbox is excellent and something similar would work a treat.

Does anyone know of a good solution? I'm not sure on budgets atm...

Thanks very much,
Ben

Amazon S3? http://aws.amazon.com/s3/

What is your internet trunk like? If you are looking at 10GB for 5 hours, I'm guessing you have a 100mbps symetric connection?

We have a standard internet connection, probably 6mb tops...

Then I'd go for an onsite NAS or file server and replicate it into the web. It will take a couple of weeks to sync all the data out into the cloud - for the initial upload, it might be worth looking to see if you can send them an external hard drive with a copy of the data on it, then you can start syncing.

A standard server would do that. THen either rsync to an external location or use online backup.

Cool, I'll look into servers/NAS a bit more. I'd like to go that way as it means Im doing more of what I like, but something cloud based means I can easily hand it over to someone else...

You need to check where the cloud servers are and what data you intend to store on them.

Loads of really "interesting" legal issues about moving data outside of the EU.

most are in USA so its a nightmare.

+1

The international aspect, especially jurisdiction can be a nightmare. You might have to talk to the provider and see if you can get them to guarantee that the data doesn't leave the UK or EU

Would this be the sort of thing you were after?
Rather expensive for lots of data but it's UK based and you can do you first backup 'offline' by sending them a copy of the data on disc.

That looks like the same backup solution we offer at work (but a lot more expensive). Not good for access, only offsite backup as you need some client software installed on the machines.

Having a look I think we could use up the 200GB limit before we would want to delete data. We probably want to store data for a month or two then delete (or weed and archive). I'm thinking of a local server with a couple of TB hdds and RAID them up in RAID 1. Not sure about backups, but a centralised solution will still be better than emailing data between our personal email accounts...

Personally I'd use a local server for hosting the files then backup to an offsite backup solution.