The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/PresentTight2293 on 2025-01-23 20:30:26.
This will be a long post, I hope people can share some ideas and help me with my data. I am an accountant and tax preparer. On personal side, I have music, movies and online gaming hobies. I recently started photgraphy and now maintain around 4 tbs of videos and pictures which are also growing day by day.
During my day, I use different computers. I have a desktop PC at office and a personal macboon pro which I use during the office, portable for meetings and use it for casual adobe lightroom/movies/browsing etc. The macbook also has windows installed, where i use office, excel, outlook classic etc. as i am more comfortable with it on windows. During the office, we also have our main tax softwares installed on a server, which i can access using remote desktop.
For office email, I use outlook which is configured on office desktop, at the server, on macbook, on macbook parallels partition, and also on the alienware. For my office workflow, I heavily rely on my emails. I also create diffeent spreadsheets, powerpoints slides and word files. Most of the tax returns prepared and bookkeeping stiff is on the office server.
I also have a gaming laptop, an Alienware which I use to mostly play games. It also stores my personal data. At home, the alienware and macbook pro connect to a untrawid monitor. I also have a synology NAS that stores the movies, personal data and photography stuff. All in all, this makes about 6 different systems i work with (excluding a NUC that just run plex). **1)**office desktop, 2) office server 3) macbook pro MacOS 4) windows on macbook pro MacOS 5) alienware laptop 6) synology NAS
My first problem is how to sync my office data between my different systems. I work from home sometimes too. At home, I need to work on alienware for office. Sometimes during office, using desktop is the better option(as it has 3 screens) and sometimes when i am meeting clients, or in another office, i use the macbook. Whichever system I am working at, ome working papers are stored there locally. Most of the time, since I am using emails, i just email the data. If client calls, or i have meetings with colleague or offshore ops, I need the data on the system i m working at. Storing everything on the synology drive makes it harder to access from office environment, as for some reason, upload speeds are too slow when accessing the network from outside my home.
I tried using icloud services, did not work as smoothly as I wanted. I tried using synology drive, it works to some extent but the upload speed from home is too slow. Managing data between different systems is becoming a nightmare. I tried using the office server to main all my files there, but the biggest problem is, it cannot run an outlook smoothly. Its not fast enough.
Secondly problem I am seeing is how to manage the photos uing lightroom, with th flexibility to use either the alienware or the macbook to view and edit files. I want to use lightroom classic, not the cloud version as it will quickly get too expensive to maintain.
Any ideas on how people have managed similar situations. I know ideally i should restrict my workflow to maybe the office desktop, office server and macbook. But ocassionally i need the alienware too when I am at home. Any ideas would be appreciated.