Welcome to the fold.
I see we can add users to login to access the shared drive. Should we have an account for each user, or all share one account? If we all share one account or multiple people share an account does that cause issues with crashing or interrupting of file transfers?
For security reasons you should have an account for each person and unique passwords. Think the issue through. You have 5 staff members, Manny, Moe, Jack, Cagney, and Lacey. You create a single user account, freelance, and all 5 users use the user name and password. Then Manny leaves. How do you prevent Manny from accessing resources? You will need to change the password for the account and that will impact everyone. In addition, using one account means that you can not protect data based on user/group. Best practice: An account for each person. Use groups. Define permissions and setting at the group level unless absolutely not possible.
Is there a way to make sure when copying a file and the drive disconnects or something that none of the files being transferred or moved will become corrupt?
If only 🙂 The best tip is to disable sleep on your workstations and disable drive spin down on the server. But, there are always potential problems. Generally file corruption is rare on OS X but nothing beats a good backup.
The server is going to be running on a mac mini with 4GB ram and connected to a time capsule for storage. Is there specs for the machine that we should be looking at? We have about 20 employees who will be accessing the server to store, move, and transfer files between their machine onto the server from inside the office, as well as from home if they wish.
Hmm. "The mini is connected to a Time Capsule for storage." Are you suggesting that the Time Capsule is what you are using for file storage? If so, then server is not going to help very much. You should get a drive and connect it to the mini and then use that for your storage. Even your mini with 4 GB of RAM should be fine for a server running DNS, OD, and File Services. Remember that all servers are limited by the Ethernet connection. So even at 1000Base, the internal and most external storage is orders of magnitude faster than ethernet. RAM is easy to upgrade, Start with the 4 and if you need more it is easy to add.
Is there an easy way to run nightly backups of all the files onto another drive or HDD? For example at lets say 1am every night it transfers new/modified files to an HDD?
You have Time Machine. There is also Carbon Copy Cloner, Retrospect, and many other products to perform backup. But keep in mind that a complete backup strategy includes offsite. Make sure you are planning for replicating your data offsite to protect against disaster.
Reid
Apple Consultants Network
Author "Yosemite Server – Foundation Services" :: Exclusively available in Apple's iBooks Store
Author "Mavericks Server – Foundation Services" :: Exclusively available in Apple's iBooks Store
Author "Mavericks Server – Control and Collaboration" :: Exclusively available in Apple's iBooks Store