Which cloud service? Pros and cons

[Bluebottle]

Out of laziness, what NAS? I am about to experiment if work will let me.

Relating to the OP (which I missed when the thread was started), the work (an HE establishment with a keen eye on security) have banned Dropbox as not meeting security standards. We have OneDrive. The downside? We cannot sync on work PCs but can on private laptops. The reason for this? The OneDrive app doesn't meet the Uni's security requirements... and round and round we go.

Hence asking about the NAS...

[Chris S]

Out of laziness, what NAS? I am about to experiment if work will let me.

A Synology DS216J: Clicky

It links to a whole host of Cloud systems - Dropbox, OneDrive, Amazon, and loads more I've never even heard of.

I'm liking it so far. Lots of connectivity options - Windows Shares, NFS, SSH/SFTP, rsync; which makes it great for centralising backups from a mixture of Windows and Linux machines, which can then be backed up to the Cloud on a schedule.

[ian]

If you need storage for work purposes, I'm not sure why your employers aren't providing sufficient in accord with whatever policies they have re privacy and security. They're setting the policies after all and it seems a bit of a drunken disco in a minefield expecting users to set up secure storage...

[mrcharly-YHT]

I'd be very surprised if any work environment would let any NAS connect in to their network. I certainly wouldn't if I was running the network.

Why do you need to store or sync work files to something like dropbox or one-drive? Is this so you can work from home? The best solution for that is to VPN in back to work - if work are worried about security. Then the files never leave the work network.

[Bluebottle]

If you need storage for work purposes, I'm not sure why your employers aren't providing sufficient in accord with whatever policies they have re privacy and security. They're setting the policies after all and it seems a bit of a drunken disco in a minefield expecting users to set up secure storage...

Oohhhhh the stories that I have heard of...

Office PCs, lecture room PCs, IT lab PCs nicely secure. Back up is keech. We have access to the storage space, but not to sensible syncing - everything needs to be manually uploaded via a browser at the mo 

Actual lab PCs (i.e. ones what drive equipment) currently completely out of reach of work support. This may change in the future, I am not sure I am looking forward to that change.

"Drunken disco in a minefield"  I might be purloining that one to occassionally replace "From bean to cup..."



Why do I need to back up stuff? I want to keep the files in work but back things up from different lab spread around the place PCs. Lab PCs are outside the work support remit (!). they are willing to install a NAS, but only under tightly controlled, rather contrived circs.

The word "workaround" would be polite. "Bodge", less so...

[David Martin]

If you need storage for work purposes, I'm not sure why your employers aren't providing sufficient in accord with whatever policies they have re privacy and security. They're setting the policies after all and it seems a bit of a drunken disco in a minefield expecting users to set up secure storage...

Oohhhhh the stories that I have heard of...

Office PCs, lecture room PCs, IT lab PCs nicely secure. Back up is keech. We have access to the storage space, but not to sensible syncing - everything needs to be manually uploaded via a browser at the mo 

Actual lab PCs (i.e. ones what drive equipment) currently completely out of reach of work support. This may change in the future, I am not sure I am looking forward to that change.

"Drunken disco in a minefield"  I might be purloining that one to occassionally replace "From bean to cup..."



Why do I need to back up stuff? I want to keep the files in work but back things up from different lab spread around the place PCs. Lab PCs are outside the work support remit (!). they are willing to install a NAS, but only under tightly controlled, rather contrived circs.

The word "workaround" would be polite. "Bodge", less so...

Now this sounds similar. We have a commercial cumulocellarium provider which gives us unlimited[1] storage but interaction with it is again painful if you want to do many things. It is nicely integrated with our single sign on but bulk uploads can be challenging. I have done them, they took a while and were flaky at the time.

Getting openauth2 to work with it from a command line would be very nice. Then I could do much better file sharing with individual students. Not got time to beat my head against it right now.
We have the same lab issue - machines that run XP on embedded processors where data collection is by sneakernet. Lots of machines controlled by arcane versions of OS (I don't think any of the OS/2 ones are still going). The support deal for those is 'when set up we will image and then restore that image if there is a problem. Will reimage upon request.'

[1] OK, max 1Tb per month per person, max file size 5Gb so not too shabby