Server required for work - advice needed.

Associate
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I hope this is ok to post here?

I have been tasked with trying to link our 2 offices together so we can access files and projects etc from each office.

Does anyone offer, or know of a service that can do this?

We already have a company that looks after our PC's etc but they keep insisting that OneDrive is the way to go. Personally I don't think it works well as we have to have 2 PC's (one at each office) that has the same information on and it keeps updating when things are changed. We don't know if someone has the same file open and end up with 2 if they both are saved, as happened yesterday.
Both PC's need to be on 24/7 and if one of them is accidentally logged off (as they are being used daily too) then obviously the files don't update.

All we need is a server in one of the offices that both offices can view as a hard drive, or similar to that.

I went to a local PC shop near to my office and they looked at me like I had 2 heads when I told them.

Thanks a lot.
 
Associate
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Cheap way to do it is a a Draytek router at each site and just use a LAN > LAN VPN. Then put a QNAP or other NAS at one of the sites with all the data on.

I do the same at some of our sites at work, but using Watchguard routers with branch office VPN and it works perfectly.
 
Soldato
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Forget an on site solution. This is cloud fodder for sure. One drive may not be the solution you need so with looking at Dropbox pro or Google maybe?

Speak with your it company, tell them one drive isn't doing what you want.
 
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Your description of onedrive sounds... interesting. You're not trying to just use the onedrive client on workstations are you? I'm 100% sure your outsourced provider mean Office 365 Onedrive centralisation of your files, which can actually be not bad at all. I think you've misunderstood them. If they actually recommended "keep two machines running with replication of a folder structure to onedrive" then that company shouldn't be in business.
 
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Thanks for the replies.

It’s down to me to sort on behalf of the company and I’m way out of the loop on these things these days.

I’ve been having a look around and found a system called pCloud Business which seems to be one of the best ways forward I think.

It’s £8.99 a member which is around what we are paying for OneDrive per member.

Has anyone had any dealings with pCloud as it looks pretty damn good for what we need.

Thanks
 
Associate
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Your description of onedrive sounds... interesting. You're not trying to just use the onedrive client on workstations are you? I'm 100% sure your outsourced provider mean Office 365 Onedrive centralisation of your files, which can actually be not bad at all. I think you've misunderstood them. If they actually recommended "keep two machines running with replication of a folder structure to onedrive" with then that company shouldn't be in business.

It’s what they recommended and what they have set up. There’s a PC in each office with the same information on the hard drive.
I don’t like it as it’s not how I wanted it all to be set up and it just isn’t working the way I want it to work.
If someone in one office saves a file it goes on the PC that has ‘OneDrive’ on it that then uploads it to ‘the cloud’ the other office has to download it on their ‘OneDrive’ PC and then if someone needs it they need to download it to their PC from the OneDrive one. And all this process can take 30 mins sometimes and it’s just not good enough.
Both offices could be in the same file and not know it until the day after when conflicted files show up.
I hope all that waffle makes sense.
 
Soldato
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The first thing to consider is what is your budget to setup this up and pay to maintain it. This determines what option you have.

Then think about where your shared data is stored and how you access it. For example do people need access out of the office over the internet, what’s the effect if your office loses connection to the outside world etc.

Think about the security of accessing the data, making sure it is properly protected and also backed up.
 
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Going the router > Router VPN route is one of the more complex, costly solutions. If you personally don't think One Drive is suiting your needs tell your IT company why. There might be a different solution they already know about.

Personally a cloud solution is the way to go and there are alternatives to One Drive that may suite your needs better. I have never used pCloud, but as above;

1) Is there a budget?
2) What is it exactly you are trying to achieve? (Just to share files from office > office)?
3) How many users need to access the materials?
4) How much space do you require?
 
Soldato
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You also need to review your Internet connectivity - do you have decent connections at both sites now? Or are you on the equivalent of a damp piece of string? In which case uploading anything, be it to a cloud sharing platform or over a site-to-site VPN is going to be frustratingly slow. Upload bandwidth is obviously important here.
 
Soldato
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Forget an on site solution. This is cloud fodder for sure.

Surely you need file locking of some sort to prevent, as the Op mentions, users creating duplicates? And i could be wrong but i don't believe Dropbox/OneDrive and the ilk offer that unless you're dealing with MS Office type documents.
And if @johntmanic is dealing with MS Office docs, which it doesn't sound like they are, then Onedrive/SharePoint and the Office apps built-in collaboration tools would handle that.

This far from a perfect solution but it sounds like some form of on-site (NAS + VPN as mentioned) or mapped cloud storage that's accessible between the two sites which offers file locking of sorts would do what the Op is after.
And if @johntmanic site connections are naff, then there are hybrid solutions (on-site + cloud) out there like Egnyte that might work.
 
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