Most small teams outgrow “folders on a laptop” before they feel ready for enterprise storage. A NAS sits in the middle: owned hardware, shared access, backups you can explain.
This guide is the practical path we use when improving file systems people already depend on — start with what must never be lost, pick redundancy you can actually maintain, document the restore path, and only then add convenience services.
Principles
Understand the current mess before you buy disks. Improve backups before you improve features. Document the restore drill. Share the setup notes so the system isn’t locked inside one person’s head.
We’ll expand this into hardware notes and a checklist as the Workbench experiment continues. For now, the point is the order of operations — not a shopping list.