NAS for remote office

[Jason Hill]

Hi,

I'm first time poster here but a long time reader so I know you guys know NAS boxes and I'm sure you'll be able to help me.

I have a remote office that is finding the VPN running over DSL slow to access the file server (SBS 2003 with about 80gb of .doc, .pdf, .xls) in the head office, especially when uploading scanned documents etc.

I have considered TS (I actually have a HP box sitting there turned off because we don't use it anymore) but it doesn't help me with uploading the scans.

My thoughts were to drop a NAS box in the remote office and have it sync up (has to update both ways because both sites will be uploading files etc) with various shares on the server either on the fly or over night at a minimum while providing local shares for the remote office users. I would also like it to work with AD for obious reasons.

Are there any boxes out there that will do this sync'ing with the SBS box for me?

Is sync'ing data (let's say upto 100Mb per day upload between the sites) over a 1Mb connection practical?

Your thought would be appreciated.

Thanks in Advance,

Jason.

 

[thiggins]

If SBS supports rsync, you should be able to do this with many NASes.

If my math is correct, transferring 100 MBytes over a 1 Mbps connection (0.125 MBytes/sec) would take 800 seconds or about 13 minutes.

 

[Jason Hill]

Thanks for the reply Tim.

I don't believe SBS supports rsync so I might have to invest in 2 NASs.

Before it does the transfer does rsync have to first do a comparison of files? Assuming it does do this do you know how long it would take it to compare the 80+Gb of data over my DSL connection?

Cheers,

JH.

 

[thiggins]

You should be able to add rsync capability to Windows. Delta Copy may work for SBS.

But your requirement is really a merge and sync of two folders / file systems. Not something that rsync is designed for. Sorry I didn't get that the first time.

 

[Jason Hill]

Hey Tim, thanks again for the comments.

What's your thoughts about dropping a NAS box in the remote office then using something like MS SyncToy 2.1 to do the sync'ing.

Cheers,
JH.

 

[thiggins]

What's your thoughts about dropping a NAS box in the remote office then using something like MS SyncToy 2.1 to do the sync'ing.

I haven't used Sync Toy. But from the description it looks like it requires Windows on both machines that host the folders to be Synchronized.
Might work if the NAS is Windows Home Server based. But not on Linux-based boxes.