California Surveyors Forums

Hello All:

I am wondering if anyone has some input on cloud based servers. We have an employee who is moving out of State, and we are looking to start up a satellite office. I am thinking this would be a good time to dial in our 90's style private server and bring it up to the new age. I really like the idea of accessing our server from anywhere but am a bit concerned about how to handle working on large files.

Does anyone have any suggestions? I am hoping for a recommendation on a decent IT firm locally in San Diego and/or input on a cloud based server option that works.

Thanks!

Ryan Post

I use my own "private cloud"... with syncthing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syncthing
Documentation: https://docs.syncthing.net/
https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing
all of my machines are using Linux operating systems, but I understand that Syncthing seems to work well with Windows also (no Mac)

You do not give access to the entire computer, only specific folders(directories) that you specify.

Note: I only synchronize Copies of files, this is not a backup solution!

I've been using Amazon's S3 servers for backup for quite a few years now. Amazon only provides the servers -- the backups go through a service provider (Jungle Disk, in my case) -- but my point is that cloud storage is reliable and pretty inexpensive. With the big providers (Amazon, Rackspace, I'm sure there are others) you can configure the level of redundancy (e.g., use only a west coast server farm, or west coast + mid-continent, or west + mid + east, etc.).

I have no experience setting up a virtual server for general access, but I bet it's a pretty standard practice, so finding a consultant to get you going probably won't be very hard. But if you're regularly dealing with large files, you're going to want a fair chunk of bandwidth available. I back up around 1GB daily, and my little ADSL connection (roughly 6 Mbps down, 1 Mbps up) would be considered pathetically undersized by most folks. I get by with it because I split my time between office and field, so it can grind away at the upload while I'm out of the office.