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Cloud for small business

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UncleEbenezer
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Re: Cloud for small business

#389148

Postby UncleEbenezer » February 23rd, 2021, 12:37 pm

Snorvey wrote:I'm looking for something that works as if it was a harddrive connected to your computer. When we tried the WD NAS drive for a few trials, it did just that and it was quick too. It just seemed so basic. Maybe Im wrong?

There are many solutions to that. Back in the days when hard discs were expensive, it was normal to save on their cost by using NFS to mount discs for many users. An option that's still available, though not recommended 'cos of security issues: it's not compatible with regular firewall principles.

These days your baseline will probably be DAV (google that if you need to). Again there are many options, and what to choose will be a tradeoff between flexibility to do just what you want, and simplicity to let someone else to everything that's remotely techie. For the first option, you can get an entire (virtual) server in the cloud for $10/month, and do everything yourself from installing the operating system (your choice - usually some flavour of linux) up. The second would be the likes of your MS offering, and I'm sure many others (google, for instance).

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Re: Cloud for small business

#389182

Postby Infrasonic » February 23rd, 2021, 1:43 pm

For any solution to be robust you'd need to think not just about the immediate issue of NAS v cloud but also redundancy and backups.
Redundancy could be solved by having on premises NAS, onsite backups and offsite cloud sync/backups (with more than one provider if needs be). Cloud to cloud automation can be done with the likes of IFTTT, Zapier, Microsoft Flow et al.

Synology make that kind of thing easier to set up as it's built into the NAS OS, but if you were to hire a decent freelance sysadmin to set it all up for you then you could go with a wide range of local/cloud solutions, including second hand enterprise NAS /servers from eBay which can be picked up very cheaply. You'd need to think about your ISP speed also - Symmetrical Gb FTTP would be preferable.

QNAP do a 'virtual NAS' option where their NAS OS is hosted in the cloud in a VM.
https://www.qnap.com/solution/qutscloud ... sor/en-uk/

Affordable roll your own cloud solutions are normally referred to as VPS (virtual private server) by the hosting companies - you'll get a dedicated amount of server resources - the more you pay the more you get. What you put on the server VM's is generally up to you (or your sysadmin...).
If you have a business that is growing fast this could be a good route to handle scaling quickly as data needs increase.

Infrasonic
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Re: Cloud for small business

#389198

Postby Infrasonic » February 23rd, 2021, 2:29 pm

https://www.synology.com/en-uk/dsm/feat ... _office365
Take complete control over Microsoft 365 data with an on-premises backup solution to protect your data in Exchange Online, OneDrive for Business, SharePoint Online, and Teams.
Cont.

GrahamPlatt
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Re: Cloud for small business

#389205

Postby GrahamPlatt » February 23rd, 2021, 2:50 pm

Second post on this thread of Infrasonic’s : viewtopic.php?f=39&t=23189
https://wasabi.com - $5.99 (=£4.30) per month for 1 TB.

Doesn’t appear in this (old) list : https://cloudstorageinfo.org/top-10-clo ... -providers

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Re: Cloud for small business

#389209

Postby Infrasonic » February 23rd, 2021, 2:56 pm

If you're going down the O365 route have a look at this too...https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/

stewamax
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Re: Cloud for small business

#389642

Postby stewamax » February 24th, 2021, 5:15 pm

Worth putting your ‘shared remote storage’ need in context.
You will need to access email, calendars and contacts. You will probably also need all these to be sharable but in a controlled way (some read only; others create/read/write/delete). You will possibly need videoconferencing and Slack-type co-ordination tools. And more ..... to avoid a dead-end solution.

For all these you will need some form of secure authentication to access them, ideally a single user-id and password, ‘modern’ authentication (ideally Oauth2) with basic authentication blocked and with multifactor authentication (Cf the banks; HMRC et al). The alternative is very long individual passwords for each system: fine in theory but if you need to write them down and carry them with you have just created an exposure!

dspp
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Re: Cloud for small business

#389709

Postby dspp » February 24th, 2021, 7:07 pm

Snorvey wrote:Thanks guys.

We really have very basic needs. Document storage/accessing /editing really.

I have set up a trial of MS 365 for business and it works a lot better than the family option we trailed before. In fact it looks like what we need as (via the onedrive app), it appears and works like another drive. I'm assuming that, with it being Microsoft and all, the weak point is the password / disgruntled employees?

Anyway, my question and I seem to be going around in circles trying to find the answer.

1 licence/user costs you £3.80 a month at the basic package. One licence lets you log in on 5 different devices (at the same time it would appear). So if I have 5 users / devices then I only need to purchase 1 licence. Right? Or is that bending the rules a bit and I really should buy 5 licences (still only £20pm at the basic package). If not, then if I need, say 8 devices, then I could get away with 2 licences?

Apologies if this is simple stuff. Microsoft really should have a section 'what exactly do I need?'


Really you should buy one licence per user. For you, five.

I run about a dozen users on O365/sharepoint/etc. All works fine provided you set it up correctly.

To put it in perspective one user fried their computer (they stuck a battery pack into the ethernet port ..... !!!). I pulled the spare laptop out of the cupboard, logged it in with their profile, and had them running with all their files and emails and everything (apart from the ones they had saved to their desktop) absolutely fine within 15-mins. To put that in perspective, I am not an IT-person and in fact detest IT in all its forms.

(I also have loathed Msft almost all my career, but hats off to them, they have this working both as a product, and in the dramatically improved global service support call centres)

regards, dspp

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Re: Cloud for small business

#398957

Postby kiloran » March 25th, 2021, 4:18 pm

Snorvey wrote:Ok, so I have had my MS 1Drive for business up and running for a month now - all is working well and exactly as I want it.

My question is about backing up the files on there. Its very slow just dragging and dropping the folders onto my SSD. Sometimes it just hangs there for ages, whereas other files ) on my computer say, just zip across. I did read in the blurb that MS backup their own drives (to another MS drive I assume), so I guess it's not stricly necessary? I'd still like a copy for myself once in a while though. Any thoughts?

Ta

When you say 'slow', do you mean a slow transfer rate, or the process is slow, dragging and dropping one at a time?
If the latter, you can select multiple items in OneDrive by holding down CTRL as you left-click on each item, then download all selected items at once

--kiloran

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Re: Cloud for small business

#398958

Postby Midsmartin » March 25th, 2021, 4:22 pm

Microsoft keep deleted files for a while (probably 90 days I think unless you change the setting, which you can) allowing you to restore them:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/restore-deleted-files-or-folders-in-onedrive-949ada80-0026-4db3-a953-c99083e6a84f
(note this link says that you *may* be able to restore it. They're not guaranteeing that it hasn't disappeared!).

But if you want to restore a file that's older than 90 days, or if something goes wrong so you can't restore the file (it happens), you have a problem. So if you're worried, an extra backup is a good idea.

If it's only you, and *all* files in onedrive are synced to your local computer, then you can just take a backup of your local disk in the normal way.
This of course fails if you set any files to be stored only in the cloud,
You can buy proper Office365 backup services, eg
https://www.office365backup.co.uk/pricing/
Typically it costs a pound or two per month per user account. I just google this company, I never used them!

I don't quite understand what you ask about being slow dragging and dropping. An SSD should be pretty quick. What precisely are you dragging from where and to where? Copying either a huge file or lots of tiny files may take ages if the source disk is a bit slow.

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Re: Cloud for small business

#398960

Postby Midsmartin » March 25th, 2021, 4:34 pm

Aha! Are you accessing Onedrive on the web? It could be slow opening files from web access, because you have to download them. IF you use the Onedrive app to sync files to your PC, then there should be no slowness (no worse than your normal computer performance anyway).

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Re: Cloud for small business

#399002

Postby Midsmartin » March 25th, 2021, 7:13 pm

So what you are doing is copying files that are only stored in the cloud. You have to wait for them to download from the internet if they are cloud only. The files area not stored locally in this case, but only a shortcut to them.

Midsmartin
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Re: Cloud for small business

#399008

Postby Midsmartin » March 25th, 2021, 7:33 pm

You can change the status of filess to be stored locally if you right click them. After that they will open as fast as any other local file on your ssd.

I think Microsoft guarantee continuity. Ie the status of your files right now. If something is deleted or becomes corrupt, they offer a system to restore it that nearly always works, but there are probably ways it can fail, and there is no guarantee.

It's not quite as secure as a backup. But many people accept it as good enough. The existence of services which provide a real backup shows there's room for improvement!

Imagine you delete something important, or it becomes corrupt, and you don't notice for 100 days. It's then lost. And I have come across ways of deleting files which seem to bypass the recovery mechanism.

So it's a judgement call. How valuable is your data ?


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