I've used Synology NAS (Network Attached Storage) as part of my home setup for several years and I've been very pleased with it and believe it would be a reasonably good solution for a small workgroup as well although I've not used it in such an environment. It does require some setup and administration - e.g. setting up users and disk quotas (if you wish) - if you wanted to go for something that required little or no administration I'd probably think of a service like Dropbox instead.
As with Drobo you can setup two Synology devices on a network and backup from one to the other, and As Perry already mentioned the Synology devices can also manage some harddisk redundancy within a single device by having two or more disks (depending on the model you buy) (and note, you have to buy disks separately to the Synology devices if you are looking at prices factor this in)
The other thing that Synology has which might be nice for your backup requirement is that it has some built in software to work with Amazon's Glacier service designed for archival data storage - which would be a reasonably cheap way of having additional offsite backup for your images if that is desired. Synology has some other nice bits of software built in which support dropbox-like functionality if that is of interest...
Hope this is of some help,
Owen
Owen Stephens
Owen Stephens Consulting
Web: http://www.ostephens.com
Email: [log in to unmask]
Telephone: 0121 288 6936
On 29 Nov 2013, at 13:19, Bonewell, Perry <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Probably not suitable if you're looking for a full blown network (and I confess I've no idea about the cost of that) but if you're storing and backing up images have you looked at Network Attached Storage systems at all?
>
> For example:
>
> http://www.synology.com/en-uk/support/nas_selector
>
> These allow one disk redundancy (and presumably other brands do too).
>
> In other words if a hard disk fails it can easily be replaced with a new one with no data loss.
>
> Perry
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Natalie Watson
> Sent: 29 November 2013 12:39
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: [MCG] Servers for Small Organisation Undertaking Digitsation Project
>
> Could anybody recommend some options for setting up a server for a small organisation to link around 10 computers together, which could also handle the storage and backup of a significant number of images that will be created as part of a digitisation project. Having not set up a server before, what equipment do you need and what things do we need to consider? Does anyone have any recommended companies and software to go with?
>
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