How do you do offline syncing and sharing of folders with people outside of your network? Having to manage a bunch of VPN accounts for outside users seems like a major pain and getting them all set up with OpenVPN seems like an even bigger pain.

We are using IPSEC VPN for external access. It works with standard clients in Windows, OSX, Linux, Android, iOS, whatever.

It allows not only access to files on NAS, but also to webapps on another box and remote desktop on yet another box.

Though I'm thinking about how to configure haproxy to allow Remote Desktop Gateway and https on the single IP, that we have.

Having to manage VPN accounts for everybody I want to share a folder with sounds like a huge pain. Especially if I have to go ask the VPN admin each time. And I'm still curious how you do offline access and syncing to local disk.

There is no offline access or syncing.

The data is available over gigabit link. It is local, after all. No need to sync to hide the latency.

And after all, there is more data on NAS, that the drive on my notebook can handle. No need to have it all locally.

So you're not actually doing everything (or even most things) that Dropbox does. I mean we also have a file server with a several TB of disk and gigabit links and VPN and all that jazz at the office, but that is in no way a replacement for what Dropbox offers.

So I guess we have different needs.

For us it is important to work on the same files. To make them available to our co-workers, to have the same versions, etc.

Syncing is a mechanism. If it would help us to achieve our goals, we could use it. If some other mechanism achieves our goals more efficiently, we would use it instead. Syncing in itself does not have value to us.

Dropbox and a NAS or file server fulfill different needs with not that much overlap. Sure you can probably hack your NAS to be a bit like Dropbox and perhaps you can hack Dropbox to work a bit like a NAS, but a the end of the day they're complements not competitors. If you don't need what Dropbox offers that's cool, but that's not the same as saying that Dropbox doesn't have anything to offer over a NAS. Personally I use both and would never want to trade one for the other.

On windows, one can use this:

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/working-with-netw...