Cache server/NAS for office

[Russinating]

I'm pretty impressed that Google Drive is even working for your use case. Have you just grown into it because it's what you had?

Shared storage for video editing doesn't have much overlap with cloud - if you don't really need these files to be accessible outside of the office then you could look at a local NAS with backups pushed up to a cloud service. 250TB is a lot of data though and you're being spoiled by Google Shared Drives being unlimited.

Pretty much everything is Google-based and we've been using it in this way for about 5 years. Like you say, the cost given we already use Google Workspace is minimal/zero and it saves the cost and upkeep of a local NAS, as well as providing additional off-site redundancy. Most production companies are going to the cloud now.

We don't regularly need files to be accessible remotely, but do occasionally (footage upload from location mainly), and it makes sharing files and folders with clients easier.

Total storage is 250TB but of course most of that is archived projects.

 

[Megahackerd]

@Sin_Chase @Caged We're a video production company. Footage captured per filming day ranges from probably 200GB up to 2TB depending on the camera/format and type of shoot. Single files are anywhere from 200MB to 100GB, again depending on file format.

Current workflow is the crew backup all files to an offline archive, and then the editors capture the footage to Google Drive. If both a) the same editor works on the edit and b) they're not due to edit it immediately, then that's fine and there's little impact. But if that's not the case, or multiple editors are working on the project semi-simultaneously, then there's a lot of wasted bandwidth which can impact the rest of the office, or the editor ends up twiddling their thumbs waiting for the download to complete. Even with the dedicated gigabit line it's not always as fast as we'd want to due to contention, Drive throttling, other network traffic etc.

If it's impossible then that's that!

what you want is local nas that the editor upload. this nas lets say 10-20tb of cache. when the footage is ingested, which is then copied to the gdrive, and if the last modified date is less than 30 days move over to gdive

rclone and mergerfs:
rclone to mount all gdrive (with cache)
mergerfs to map a local drive and rclone mount together so it seamless

then just make this folder available via a share

not sure if any proprietary nas offers the same options

 

[lsg1r]

Haven't read all the details, I skimmed, but going to put a random idea here which might be something you can work with.... for the online side of things at least, however if you are more video focused like you say then there are far better ways of doing things than using google drive etc...

You can set a default location to download files from most web browsers and you can also relocate the default downloads folder. Map the folder on the nas as the download folder.

However as said with the video files being the main thing then you'd be better off having a central nas/server hosting the files on site and remotely accessing them via the internal network and mapped drives etc... ideally you'd want to use a faster than 1gig network connection on each pc and the nas of course. A decent nas/server can be setup to allow remote access from off site as well and most nas software now has support for offsite backups with the likes of gdrive etc.

Having said that I'd still say you'll need to copy over to the local pc for optimal performance imo.