Web host server as mapped network drive?

[footdale]

I'm the IT guy for our small engineering company, unfortunately I'm no IT guy. We are primarily contractors/consultants all working in separate physical locations. We've been using dropbox for the last couple of years to store/share all of our files. For the most part we've been happy with how it works, but have reached the free limit and now have to pay for the service.

Is there an easy way to take advantage of the unlimited storage we have with our web host service? Talking to them all they do is point me towards using ftp. That would work, but we want to avoid having to download the file, modify, then re-upload. Sometimes we work on proposals and such simultaneously and fear the lack of document control.

Ideally we would like to have a mapped network drive for all our users. Is it possible to do this with a virtual private server, or would we have to set up our own physical fileserver? How are you guys set up or do you have any recommendations?

Thanks!
Joe

 

[n1ywb]

You might deploy some sort of content management system that supports document workflows, like Plone or SharePoint; there are many to choose from nowadays.

Depending on what sort of files they are you might look at some sort of revision control system like Subversion, Git, or Mercurial.

 

[n1ywb]

You also might want to look into http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebDAV

 

[ChiXJeff]

Seating my tinfoil hat securely, there is no way that I'd use DropBox for anything that would have the faintest possibility of being confidential or proprietary. Or any other filedrop service on the 'net. Your ISP filehosting would be a little better but hardly a good idea.

You really should have your own server, set up behind your own firewall for this.

 

[kastein]

Do you have SSH, SCP, and/or FTPS/SFTP access to the server? I'm reasonably certain you can use WinSCP to do this, it's free (might have to buy a license for corp use), and it can map a drive or folder to the remote system I believe. I used it for this back in 2006, the only downside is that it does lock a file when it sees it change so that it can upload it without getting a half changed file, which may cause minor problems with some apps.

 

[footdale]

Well if they say it's secure then it must be right?

I'm looking into setting up our own fileserver too. But now I'm responsible for setting it up and the maintenance, which I'm not too excited about. On a side note...While looking around at the options, there seems to be a lot of cloud services aimed at businesses out there. Seems like they are convincing people that their data is safe.

 

[kastein]

PS, dropbox really is not to be trusted. They had an accidental issue a few months ago where ANY dropbox account could be accessed with no password.

My company uses it :helpme: and I can't convince the bossman to switch to something else

 

[ChiXJeff]

Cloud services just scare the daylights out of me, and data security is only one aspect.

 

[ehall]

I won't even put my irregular personal data on somebody else' server, nevermind any data that may affect my ability to make my own payroll. I don't trust them to give a crap about my data, and lawsuits can only do something after some kind of damage has been done.