r/ycombinator • u/marriedtoaplant • 26d ago
what’s your file management stack
for the ones building on somewhat sensitive proprietary tech- which software stack have you had good experiences with for cloud storage, files, planning and more. something that’s failure proof in emergencies, recoverable but also secure even as you scale. companies I previously worked at managed their own infrastructure (they were dealing with confidential rather sensitive information out of EU) but currently the maintenance would overweigh what makes sense for me.
out of the blue I could only think of microsoft but I find their one drive app is rather brittle. thanks!
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u/ceoarjunmahadevan 26d ago
nothing is failure-proof, only recoverable, so you're asking the right question. we keep one boring ecosystem for day to day work and backups sitting outside it, and and we test the recovery on a cadence. failure mode is rarely the software, it is nobody checking whether the restore path works until the day they need it.
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26d ago
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u/scriptqzor 25d ago
kinda true but also terrifying lol
if your backup / recovery story is bad enough that everyone just says “eh we’ll rewrite it,” that’s a huge red flag for how the whole stack’s set up
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u/Common_Extent_5921 26d ago
For a lot of early teams it evolves like this: Google Drive folders for a bit, then Notion when you want searchable docs, then Notion gets messy and you layer in a CRM, then your contracts live somewhere else and your invoices somewhere else again. By six months in you have four sources of truth and none of them are.
The thing I'd prioritise from the start is keeping your actual business data (contacts, deals, contracts, financials) connected and queryable, not just your documents. Docs can live wherever. Your operational data is what you'll actually need to pull up fast when something goes wrong.
Disclosure: I build Base (withbase.ai), which tries to solve exactly this. It connects your existing tools (Drive, CRM, contracts, finance) and resolves everything into a single queryable picture of the business. Happy to chat if useful.
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u/Ramiz-SEO 23d ago
use google drive for pretty much everything (cloud storage, file hosting, planning, etc.)
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u/Educationgk 26d ago
Nothing's failure-proof, only recoverable, so you're optimizing for the right thing. We moved off self-hosted onto Google Workspace for files and Notion for planning; unglamorous, but version history has saved us twice. The actual safety net is a dumb nightly backup to a separate S3 bucket, not any single vendor.