Assuming you are working  somewhere with a small team and you need a local Windows share to collaborate on documents and oder data. A first choice would obviously be to use Dropbox or a similar cloud service. However if you do not want to send your data to another company or if your internet connection is unstable, you might want to use a server in your local network. My suggestion here is the following: Grab yourself a Rapberry PI, configure a Windows compatible Samba share and start using it.

Preparation

• Purchase a Raspberry PI 3, a power supply, an SD card and preferably an enclosing.
• Write the Raspbian image to the SD card and start the PI.
• Use sudo raspi-config  to set the hostname and enable SSH.

Install Samba

• Run sudo apt-get install samba samba-common-bin  to install the required packages.
• Create the folder for the share: sudo mkdir -m 1777 /share
• Open /etc/samba/smb.conf  as root (sudo!) using vim or nano (according to your taste of Linux editors and append the following block at the bottom.

  [share]
  Comment = PI Share
  Path = /share
  Browseable = yes
  Writeable = Yes
  only guest = no
  create mask = 0777
  directory mask = 0777
  Public = yes

• Restart the samba service: sudo service samba restart

Create Users

Now you can create the accounts that will be able to use the share:

sudo adduser --no-create-home --disabled-password --disabled-login newuser
sudo smbpasswd -a newuser
sudo service smbd force-reload

You can now access the share using the hostname or the IP address in your windows explorer: \\ip\share

Configure Backup

Never trust your users not to mess up things. You should not skip doing backups, especially when it is as easy as this:

1. Edit the crontab file: crontab -e
   Add the following line at the bottom to create a backup every hour from 7 to 22.

   0 7-22 * * * /home/pi/run-backup.sh

2. Create the backup script: sudo nano /home/pi/run-backup.sh  and add the following content.

   FILES="/share/"
   FOLDER="/home/pi/backups"
   
   echo "starting backup of $FILES to $FOLDER"
   zip -r $FOLDER/share-backup-$(date +"%Y%m%d-%H%M").zip "$FILES"
   # delete backups older than 3 days
   find $FOLDER -type f -mtime +3 -delete
   echo "finished backup"

3. Make the script executable: chmod a+x /home/pi/run-backup.sh

Backups are now created every hour as zip files in the folder /home/pi/backups/ .

Sources

• SAMBA: SET UP A RASPBERRY PI AS A FILE SERVER FOR YOUR LOCAL NETWORK