Hardware recommendations

[jpadie]

Hello

i have an environment with two macs in an office and several laptops floating around. until recently they have all been used by me and i've kept files in sync using a variety of arcane solutions. but i've just hired someone and want to think a bit more strategically about file storage.

i'm NOT looking for a back-up solution. i have plenty of those.

I am looking for a file storage solution that talks AFS, is networked AND is secure. ie. the files on the box are encrypted and decrypted on the fly based on user access privileges.

I cannot use true crypt/file vault etc as they are not multi-user accessible and this stuff will be read/write all day long.

does anyone have any recommendations for such a box? cheap as chips too, please.

thanks
Justin

 

[twiSSt]

What kinds od files are we talking about? Regular word docs, excel files, graphics? There are any number of file storage devices, network attached, etc. Drobo comes to mind, a quick google search will yield quite a few more. Drobo is probably on the more expensive side of things, but Lacie offers network storage, as well as Western digital

Twist

===========================================
Everything will be OK in the end.
If it's not OK, then it's not the end

 

[jpadie]

yup - traditional office documents.

but (having looked at Drobo and Lacie's offerings) i can't see how any of these solutions offer data security as per my original post.

 

[twiSSt]

Sorry I missed that the first time, but have a look at this

http://www.truecrypt.org/

Open source disk encryption, cross platform. The offerings I see for encrypted storage devices are pretty pricey. True Crypt is free

Although I have not used this myself, I do recall hearing positive things about it.



Twist

===========================================
Everything will be OK in the end.
If it's not OK, then it's not the end

 

[jpadie]

i was previously told that truecrypt could not work multi-user as true-crypt drives mount as exclusive to the attached user. i will research again.

is there really no straightforward solution here? windows offers encryption of all files on the fly, is there nothing equivalent in the Mac world?

 

[spamjim]

You might look at MacFuse to handle non-Mac file systems that offer encryption.

 

[jpadie]

thanks Jim. my experiences with macFuse have been pretty terrible. userland filesystem drivers seem to be incredibly slow.

and, as per my previous, i cannot believe that there is no simple out of the box solution that does this for macs. i've been a mac user for so long that i've never imagined going back to windows. But now ...