Need advice please...
 

I'm looking at trying to setup a 'central' hard drive for content production stuff, predominantly eBook writing and publishing.

This drive will have 4 folders in it, manuscripts, images, covers and published.

I want to be able to give access to this drive to individuals in a different country to myself.

For example, my cover designer is in Belgium, he needs access to the drive to grab files from the /images/ folder to create covers, which he will then save in the /covers/ folder.

One of our editors lives in Florida, she needs to access the /manuscripts/ folder to edit the .docx files for errors.

The guy who does our publishing is located in London, he needs access to all of the folders, with the exception of the /images/ one.

Is there a way that I can have this drive located in New Orleans and just let these people access it as needed, through a regular internet connection or do I need some kind of fancy setup to achieve this?

Any help / advice would be appreciated :)

Pretty sure you can just achieve this with DropBox or OneDrive or something. I mean, at the construction company I worked at, we used MS Teams and everything was accessible by everyone who needed it via Google Drive and permissions setup properly.

I would use a cloud service or an actual Server/VPS. If it's a large amount of content, I would look into setting up a NAS locally but it's going to have an impact on your teams download/upload speeds.

Set up protected directories and symbolic links if you don't want to use cloud.
I wish I had your worries.

I would echo others and say that this is the perfect opportunity to use a host, or a cloud service, like Dropbox. It doesn't sound like you need to host a lot of large files, so FTP would be excellent for this, and so would Dropbox, or even BackBlaze B2 with their interface.

With FTP, on something like Vacares, you can setup individual SFTP/FTP accounts with different jailed directories, that way people aren't allowed to touch things they're not supposed to. Dropbox would work similarly with sharing.

Of course, whatever you decide to do, consider both replication and backup policies.

If you want to self-host this without a cloud provider, I would purchase a network attached storage device and setup a VPN on the device. OpenVPN is certainly an option and I believe pairs well with Synology. I like Neorouter, but it doesn't fit every device.

What kind of security do you need?

What would happen if all files would disappear one day or if it gets banned?

Will it be only non-porn stuff?

I would never use Dropbox or OneDrive for porn stuff. They can ban you at any time without a warning.

Best option would probably be a SFTP that you could then use as you wish with any OS. You could do backups on it elsewhere if needed.

We can help you with that.

A VPS with scalable storage up to 7TB, or any of our tiers of object storage would be ideal. Alternatively, a dedicated server.

MojoFire probably too fast, not priced right for your use case
MojoIce - likely appropriate tier, lowest cost
MojoVault - probably not the right product, web accessible for restoring files only

Brad

Thanks for all the input, have to do some more research into this now lol

The choice hinges on how much storage is necessary and whether security is a large concern. Based on these, you can make a decision for either a shared host or small VPS to host this, cloud storage (MojoIce, Backblaze, Wasabi etc.), generic providers like Dropbox or even Google Docs, or a full dedicated server with lots of RAIDed drives.

Holy shit dude, a dropbox account could be setup in under 30 minutes to do everything you need, how are you richer than me! :1orglaugh:1orglaugh:1orglaugh

THere are lots of ways to do it. Like Hugles said, the easiest and cheapest way is to use Dropbox.

If you want something a little more elegant, you can create a website and host it at the hosting provider of your choice, and manage permissions and access to your content that way.

If you want to do it all for free and geek-out at the same time, you could host it yourself in your own home or office with any old computer. There are technical challenges of course, but it would be a good learning experience, and it would be completely free.