File sharing advice for SMB

[philvallender]

Hello,

Thanks in advance for answering my questions and helping me make a good decision.

I run a small business and we currently have some sort of windows small business server as our shared file storage. It's small (500GB), expensive and while it has lots of functionality, we use none of it and I don't know how to configure it. I.e. workgroups etc. I'm thinking I would like to move away from windows server to an appliance and I use QNAP at home - I'm very happy with it.

I have a couple of questions about using a QNAP NAS in the workplace. Hopefully, you can help me:

1) I assume that for users on the LAN (combination of Windows and Mac) the NAS can be a simple mapped drive?
2) When users are remote, what would be the preferred way of providing secure access to the files on the NAS? VPN, FTP, WebDAV, something else?
3) When local and remote users are saving to the NAS, is backup to the cloud (e.g. AWS S3) for disaster recovery possible?
4) I recently discovered that the windows server could store versions of recently changed files (in case of accidental deletion) is this possible on an SMB NAS?

Any other hints, tips or resources I should read appreciated.

Thanks.

[aspomwell]

1. Yes
2. Many options, I'm not an expert on these so I'll let someone else answer
3. There are many vendors that allow this, although the one I have a current active license for (crashplan) doesn't have an officially supported version. There are guides to install it though, but I haven't done so yet. There seems to be about a dozen alternatives that have packages in the app center though.
4. If you do snapshots they are available under the previous versions tab in windows (or so I'm told, haven't actually tested that yet).

[philvallender]

Thanks aspomwell,

Thanks for your comments. I thought the feature set looked pretty good for my application. Hopefully someone can comment on the file sharing methods and confirm about versioning.