Capacity Planning

To carry out any form of capacity planning I would look at what the users do - what applications they run, what sort of data do they generate?

The capacity you require over 5 years is solely dependant on the type of data that you are storing - databases, spreadsheets, presentations, word processor documents. You need to identiry all of this before you can start working out the amount of storage you are going to need.

With regard where to have users store data, I prefer using a server - if you imploy proper security on a proper Network Operating System you can use one server for all your data - the "important data" and the "user data". This would make the back-up system much simpler as well and would protect user data also.

Hope this helps.

I agree with the previous answer on finding out what type of data the users are storing and also the single file for all data.

My further suggestion would be to implement an archive policy i.e. files older than 18 or 24 months are archived (depends on the environment and file life cycle).

Security depends on the NOS you are using and backup is generally full once a week with incrementals the other days. Really depends on your volume of data and restore/disaster recover requirements.