Oh I see, yes that makes sense.
Regarding using a Mac Mini as a file server quickly. You will need:
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1 Mac Mini (get one with an SSD, it doesn’t have to be high spec, just get a new one for the support)
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1 External hard drive, I can absolutely recommend the Promise Pegasus 2 R4 (not cheap, but excellent quality and speed - we use them in both offices for 5 years with 0 issues)
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1 UPS (uninteruptable power supply), we use the APC BackUps Pro 900. This is really important if you want to have a server that can run constantly and is really worth it (in my experience most of the hardware failures can be traced back to some kind of electrical fault/spike/powercut)
Hook everything up through the APC, so now you already have a super stable system.
Purchase Mac Server and install it. You need this to create user groups and users. Create a user for each person and name them exactly the same as the user on their individual mac (just makes it easier) - since you probably don;t want to store user data on the server, have them as “services only”.
Now in the normal Mac Sharing preferences you can set up file sharing. Best to have a few major folders on the external harddrive like “Time Machine” and “File Server” and then set those up. You can do both in the normal settings of MacOS now.
If you buy Mac Server and have a new Mac Mini you get free support from Apple, which has helped me a lot. If you bought Server and the Mac they will forward you to the Enterprise Support, which is simply incredible. I knew nothing about setting up a server and they walked me through absolutely everything with a remote session. I was on the phone with them for a total of around 4 hours the first time and it was completely free and they were so nice about it.
So more or less that’s it. Of course there a lot of small things, but nothing too complicated.
By the way we had everything on Dropbox before and eventually had to give that up. It was just getting too unveildy and at the time our connection also wasn’t very fast. Plus if something fails and you have to download your entire Dropbox of >1TB again, that’s a real pain and takes a long time. Dropbox is not really designed to handle more than a few hundred thousand files, which can happen surprisingly quickly. The constant syncing was also really slowing down the machines.
If you use Backblaze on your Mac Mini Server, which is the main advantage over using some kind of NAS - you just sign up for a normal Backblaze account for 60 dollars a year and it will backup everything, including your external file storage. No quotas or anything we have like 4TB on there. Backblaze actually does a lot of things Dropbox does as well like file versioning/restoring and has saved our butts a few times.
All in all I think its a very good setup. Like I said it runs super solid in 2 locations. I checked on the server the other day at the other company and it had an uptime of 372 days, so the server hadn’t been restarted in that long.