Trying to find usage specific onsite/offsite dataset sharing protocol (SMB - VPN - Nextcloud - other ?)

DonGuig

Cadet
Joined
May 11, 2019
Messages
4
Hi All,

I've built a Freenas from scratch in order to share sound collections with other fellow sound engineers. We have two small sound editing suites, one of which houses the freenas box, and we need to be able to access the sound collections locally when editing in these rooms, but also remotely when working in other studios.

We are all using macos (10.10 to 10.13). The ideal setup would allow us to keep the dataset containing the sound collections permanently mounted in macos when working onsite, to be able to pick sounds on the fly. However when offsite, we keep copies of the sound collections on drives with us, as accessing the dataset through the internet would be too slow for proper use (let alone the times we don't have an internet connexion at all). But, I'd like to be able to sync my offsite copy of the sound collection to the "master" copy on the NAS remotely, so as not to be forced to get back to the rooms to do that.

Initially, I was inclined to do a SMB share for local sharing, and make a VPN access to synchronize when offsite. But I'm a bit put off by the complexity of installing OpenVPN in Freenas - and I'm worried I would make mistakes during configuration which would impact security. Unfortunately the hardware router from our ISP has no VPN protocol that we could use on macos.

I was looking also into Nextcloud external storage feature (I've installed the Nextcloud plugin). But I'm not sure it can be used to do manual sync between offsite copies and the datasets on the NAS (I want to have control on when I choose to synchronize an offsite copy with the "master" on FreeNAS). Also, I read it wouldn't play well having both local access through SMB while having access to the same dataset with Nextcloud.

* So * I'm basically asking for good advice on the right combination of sharing protocols that would suite my needs. I've been googling a lot, but I still have a lot of blind spots on what could work. Another thing to consider is that while I'm confortable with CLI and some tech-savvy configuration, I need to find something that is really simple to use once implemented for my colleagues. All advice welcome !

Best,
Guillaume
 

DonGuig

Cadet
Joined
May 11, 2019
Messages
4
Hi,

Well I'd been researching quite a bit, but I'm still stuck. It seems to me like a VPN would be the right solution, but reading through threads about installing openVPN I have trouble evaluating wether or not these guides are bullet-proof or if doing something slightly wrong could lead to compromised security (the data I'll have on the FreeNAS won't be sensitive at all, but still I'd rather avoid opening our LAN to anyone untrusted).

If you have any insights on this or on other possible solutions I'd love to get some feedback !

Thanks,
Guillaume
 
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