Online file collaboration

Humpty

Humpty

Humpty

Associate
Joined
19 Nov 2003
Posts
984
Hi, we have a somewhat unusual problem and I was wondering if someone might be able to give me pointers as to a solution that would work for us.

  • I have a small business (15 employees) with a head office, branch office and some home workers
  • We have an internal file and domain server (SBS2011)
  • We need to share a large number of files (>20,000) across the team. The files are mostly small pdfs and Office documents

The issues I have run up against:

  1. Can't share directly from the SBS server as the internet connection at the head office is very slow (around 2mb/s down, 0.2mb/s up)
  2. Dropbox won't work as when users access files at the same time or offline then conflicted copies of the file are generated and a real mess develops
  3. I thought that OneDrive & Sharepoint were the ideal solution but the number of files across all Sharepoint instances that can be synced is limited to 20,000 (and there are file path length issues)

So, can anyone recommend me a solution that might work for us?

Thanks. Really appreciate your help and advice on this.
 
Run a VPS or AWS instance and put OwnCloud on it. That has installations of many terabytes and hundreds of thousands of users out there so should work for you. It's basically like a self managed Dropbox/onedrive
 
Humpty said:
Dropbox won't work as when users access files at the same time or offline then conflicted copies of the file are generated and a real mess develops
Click to expand...

Rather than downloading/working/syncing files, why not work on them live in the cloud?

With Google Docs you can work live on "Word" documents or "Excel" sheets, complete with a robust revisioning system, so you can see who changed what.

I haven't used the cloud-based version of Office 365 (or whatever it's called now), but I would hope that it offers something similar by now.
 
Moving 20,000 Office files into the Google Docs / Sheets formats is probably a complete non-starter. And yes, you've discovered that while SharePoint offers things like real-time collaboration, it's a very poor file server replacement and you will have a lot of problems.

Are people needing to access from laptops/phones, or are they all based in an office of some description?

I would look at Egnyte - the latest Windows app supports distributed file locks https://helpdesk.egnyte.com/hc/en-us/articles/202206920
 
Thanks for these helpful responses.

Syncing is needed as the connection at the main office is not fast enough to support the users there unless there is some syncing to the local server.

Egnyte looks like it might be just the ticket. I was hoping for for something with less cost but if it does the job then it will be worth the additional overhead.

Appreciate your help.
 
That would be a good option but the head office is in a rural location so the install costs for a leased line are massive. Maybe some time in the future.
 
That's why we need a solution where the server syncs to the cloud and users in the office access files on the server but external users access files on the cloud. File sizes are small so it should be fine if the solution offers this setup.
 
So basically create an internal SVN server that all local clients sync to internally which then mirrors itself to another external server for others to access remotely?
 
That may be an option but is likely to require a higher administrative overhead than I was after. Thanks for the suggestion though.
 
Humpty said:
That's why we need a solution where the server syncs to the cloud and users in the office access files on the server but external users access files on the cloud. File sizes are small so it should be fine if the solution offers this setup.
Click to expand...

Syncing files to cloud storage even if they are small is going to be painful with a 200 kbps upload.

Your best solution would be to put everything into the cloud, your server and the client machines. That would probably give the fastest performance but obviously would be quite costly.
 
Thanks Rozzy. LANSync is good but the issue with Dropbox is still the conflicted files. Dropbox will not lock files when one user has them open. What we really need is a cloud based file server rather than cloud storage.
 
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