Small (very small for now) business storage requirements

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henkc

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I am in the process of retiring and intend to do bits and pieces of consulting. One of the things I've realised I need to look at is data storage and backup. Right now, what I have is a laptop - perfectly adequate for what I need - with its own SSD and a 1TB OneDrive account. There are two of us, my wife and I, who share a family Microsoft 365 account.

What I've realised is that I am going to need to think about storage to ensure that work in progress is secure, completed work is archived and everything is backed up. The way I am thinking is that initially I will be storing relatively small amounts of data - documents, spreadsheets, photos etc. The challenge could arise if and when I start dealing with large datasets - geophysics, satellite imagery, lidar, drone surveys and so on, which will hopefully eventually start coming in and needing storage.

What is a good place to start, particularly looking at scalability over time?
 
I'd recommend a local NAS that backs up to a cloud provider (or two).

You'd want to have an idea of how much storage you may be needing and whether you need it for purely backup storage or if you'd want to be working directly from it, as that would impact what type of NAS you want (i.e. SSD vs HDD and network speed).

I actually have a small second hand 4-bay unit up for sale currently: https://mybroadband.co.za/forum/threads/sale-western-digital-my-cloud-pr4100-4-bay-nas.1318439/
 
Just to add to DrJohnZoidberg suggestions - do not rely on OneDrive as your backup.

Either have local storage with backups to external drives that you rotate and store in a different location or use another cloud storage provider like pcloud (www.pcloud.com) / AWS S3 where you can scale as your needs increase.

A local NAS running TrueNAS Scale (now called "community edition") can orchestrate all that for you + has loads of extra functionality with remote access using eg. ZeroTier / sync files with SyncThing / etc
 
AWS S3 or Azure blob storage ... thank me later
 
Another option reared it's ugly head. A basic PC, with a bunch of hard drives in some or other sort of RAID array. This would probably cost a bit less than a 4 bay NAS. If push comes to shove, I have a currently unused RaspberryPi lying around somewhere.
 
ubercal said:
AWS S3 or Azure blob storage ... thank me later
Click to expand...
I've looked at both and I hate to say it, but the various options involved make it very difficult to work out exactly what you're getting here and what it's going to cost. Perhaps if I had a better idea of what I was looking at, it would be simpler.

Can anyone point me in a direction that simplifies all of this.
 
Storing a large amount of data cheaply is easy and simple. Fire up an old PC / raspberry pi with a large external hard drive and away you go. Add external drives as you go along.

There is no simple way to store things and ensure that they stay stored and that the integrity of the data is preserved and that you can retrieve the data when you need to in the time that you need to retrieve it.

However, your description fits this :

1. Use an old PC/raspberry pi with external USB drives. Start with a 4TB drive and add drives as you need storage. This requires no technical knowledge and you don't have to mess with RAID or running a NAS and the complexity that involves. Use this setup to retrieve data quickly

2. Store a backup of all these drives on Amazon Glacier. You need several hours at least to retrieve anything from Amazon Glacier cheaply, but this is a very cheap option to create a second backup of your "hot data". If any of the external drives fail, replace it and retrieve the data from Amazon Glacier.

3. Backup every week. Large data sets like the ones youre describing don't typically get updated daily , otherwise you would be storing them in a database. So a weekly backup schedule of the drive that you are currently using should be enough.
 
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a decent external drive that mirrors with google drive. I will never trust a NAS again, when they fail, they can fail bad. they not meant for data security, they more meant for network sharing/data streaming. Most people i know that uses Nas drives at their home business has had a bad experience. I have a 4 bay synology with 4x8TB drives collecting dust, i dont trust it.

Now i got a much cheaper 10TB external drive (thats faster via usb than a 1gbit lan) and live sync with google drive. i did the math, google drive will take a silly amount of years to equal the cost of a nas.
 
I use OneDrive and then sync to Synology Server (RAID 1) and then another backup to an External Drive.
 
Thanks for the replies so far.

Where I think I am going is:
  1. A NAS seems like an expensive luxury, especially considering my objective of neither having, not being a boss. IOW I won't be sharing files with cow-orkers in any sort of real time sense and when I'm not in the office, no work should be being done.
  2. Even the option of a networked PC/RaspberryPi is overkill, for the same reason the NAS is.
  3. I'm going to be investing in a docking station anyway for monitor(s), external drives and so on. Two drives hooked to this will provide storage and an on-site backup. One more backup to some or other cold storage cloud service, for disaster recovery.
Or am I missing something?
 
  1. A NAS seems like an expensive luxury, especially considering my objective of neither having, not being a boss. IOW I won't be sharing files with cow-orkers in any sort of real time sense and when I'm not in the office, no work should be being done.
  2. Even the option of a networked PC/RaspberryPi is overkill, for the same reason the NAS is.
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Then USB devicestjies it is then. Best you can do is a robocopy script that ensures changes are replicated each day.
 
Apple iCloud 50GB = R15pm
Microsoft OneDrive 100GB = R35pm
Google One (Google Drive) 100GB = R30pm

Amazon and Oracle are more complicated....
 
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