Migrating your file server or NAS to the cloud for distributed user access doesn't need to be complicated or require complex networking architectures, hardware gateways or restrictive practices that inhibit productivity.
LucidLink Filespaces were specifically designed to leverage cloud storage and provide direct data access to client operating environments across Windows, macOS and Linux.
Filespaces provide data access by streaming only the data required, when requested. Data is encrypted on the client-side, at rest and in-flight therefore you know your data is protected without the complexity of VPN services. The Filespace presents as if it is a natural local extension of your operating system, backed by the storage provider of choice.
In this knowledge base we will create a Filespace and migrate our data from our local NAS to our Filespace for access by our office employees from anywhere.
There is no need to change application workflows, as data appears to each user as it did from a network share. Each user will install the LucidLink client onto their machine, connect to the Filespace with their own credentials and interact with the data shared for their access as if their data is local.
Our organization comprises of 30 employees and 1.7TB of data on a centralized NAS.
Our team is distributed, working worldwide, and in many cases operating from home. Filespaces provide our employees disruption-free access to their data.
Lets show you how we did it, we were obviously in a unique position to leverage our own solution. You can do the same, it is this simple:
2. Create your Filespace following our Getting Started Guide you can choose between LucidLink Storage or bring your own object storage provider within the region closest to the bulk of your users.
We have a video of creating a Filespace here.
3. Our legacy NAS was available as \\nas\data to our workstations, with some accessing it as a mapped drive letter, others over a VPN, that all goes away with our Filespace as your mount-point will present itself conveniently within your users file browsers.
To show you a familiar view of no doubt your typical environment you are operating under, it was a pretty simple traditional corporate folder structure.
4. Defining a migration strategy presents us with multiple options: do we move the data 1st. or do we move only our most active data, our current data, or data accessed in the past 3 months and backfill in the background historical information? That's up to you.
In our specific case we had time, so we moved the lot and scheduled a specific day to switch across. Many organization don't have that luxury, so we've put a KB together to aid in the multiple migration strategies which might best suit your particular organization.
We opted to robocopy our data from a Windows instance connected to our Filespace:
robocopy \\nas\data\ %userprofile%\Lucid\lucidlink\ /e /z /mt /r:0 /w:0 /log:migration.txt /np
As our employees were using our NAS we needed to perform an initial transfer and repeat the process once that had completed to pick up any files that were in use or had changed since our initial copy commenced.
Our connection in our office where our NAS was located had 100Mbps upload therefore we had a rough estimate of transfer speed based on estimations from https://www.calculator.net/bandwidth-calculator.html which indicated roughly 2 days.
Please note data transfers may differ depending on data types. LucidLink compresses data for upload therefore some data types like documents compress reasonably well and consume less upload bandwidth. Transfer calculation estimates don't take into account the benefits of our compression.
5. We will have to setup our user access, to do that we need to create our users. In our company we have 30 employees therefore we have used a script to bulk create our users and provide our example template file.
A video is available to guide you through the user creation concept.
6. Once our users are created it is time to setup our user access controls. If you haven't yet completed your migration, to proceed here you'll need at least to replicate your directory structure, you of course do not yet need to migrate all your data yet, although if you already have great!
Users access only the data in the Filespace that they require access via shares. you can administer your Filespace shares and also perform a bulk share configuration via a script which we also provide our company share as an example template.
Our administering shares video is a helpful resource to review.
7. Let's summarize what we've done so far: we've created our Filespace, we've transferred our data, and we've setup or users and their access to the data they require to operate.
8. User operation of your Company Filespace
Each user will need to download our client to connect to our Filespace with their own unique username and password. Their Filespace mount-point will present them only the data that has been made available to them via our access control share functionality.
We have a video of connecting to your Filespace however i'll briefly join with my username to review my access rights:
a. Launch the LucidLink client provide your filespace.domain, username and password (options: select stay connected to remember your credentials)
b. Open the folder
c. Note the data available to my credentials
In step 5 we used a bulk user creation script to create our individual user credentials. We specified a temporary password for each user, once your users connect, you will require them to change their password to something only they know.
For convenience your users can also opt to stay connected where their Filespace will automatically resume on system start/logon.
9. Lets direct our focus on the data protection elements of our Filespace as we need to ensure we can protect against accidental or malicious data corruption. We will achieve this in the form of automatic snapshot schedules.
At a minimum, we would want to ensure we have an ability to access prior points in time of our data, automatically.
Built into Filespaces are snapshots that come in the form of two options: manual or schedules.
We would recommend that you setup a snapshot schedule to protect your data, and perform periodic manual snapshots during times outside those scheduled snapshot events.
For an overview of our snapshots in action please see this video.
10. Contact Support. We would be more than happy to help you through getting your users collaborating remotely as quickly as possible.
If you run into difficulties of any description, no matter how small, do not hesitate to open a Support Ticket.