Small business file sharing help? Box.net? Dropbox? Something else?

September 4, 2015 7:08 AM

Dunno if Dropbox can help me. Need to share large folder of work materials on a work computer with some laptops without enough disk space to sync the entire folder to. Help?!

Hi. We're a small business. Right now, we have 5 desktop computers in our office. One of them has a large hard drive that is shared on our local network. This is where we store all of our data. This works really well as long as we are all in the office. It's about 750 GB of stuff.

It breaks down when I try to use my laptop outside of the office. For a while I was using GoToMyPC to access and edit files on our network share drive. It was a pain: connect to my work computer, download file to my computer, work on it, upload back to work computer.

For smaller situations I have used DropBox. But I can't set up DropBox, I don't think, because the shared drive is so big and it would fill up my laptop hard drive if I tried to sync the entire shared drive using DropBox onto my laptop.

Can you offer me any advice about how to do this? I'd like to be able to see all my files easily, and maybe have the system only download a local copy when I try to open it or something?

I really don't know much about what to do. Please give me some advice. Thank you.

posted by rachelpapers to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

You can just sync the folders you want on each machine. It's really easy and I have mine set up like this all the time. I was going to write out instructions, but dropbox already did it for me. I'm not sure how clear their instructions are, so maybe give it a go and come back if you have any more questions?
posted by shelleycat at 7:14 AM on September 4, 2015

Perfect! Thank you so much.
posted by rachelpapers at 7:32 AM on September 4, 2015