Server required for work - advice needed.

[johntmanic]

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.

 

[johntmanic]

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

 

[johntmanic]

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.