How to protect office files from damage?

Question

Samba

Hello, today an excel file with a large table (2MB) broke, a person's labor day was lost. I would like to avoid this in the future. The situation occurs about 1-2 times a year. Backups work, so we lost only a day of work.

Infrastructure
Small office, several dozen PCs, Windows 7 file server, HW-RAID-10.
Win7 (SMB2) clients, but soon all will be Win10 (SMB3).

Situation
Clients work in MS Office 2016 over the network via mounted drives via SMB.
On the problem PC, the hard drive failed due to overheating. I didn’t find the info quickly, but I suppose that when working via SMB, the .xls file was copied to the user’s PC, edited there, and when the “save” button was pressed, the changes were sent to the server. At some point, due to a damaged local hard drive, the file got corrupted and crooked changes were sent to the server that broke the original file.

Questions

1. Is this how SMB2 works? Are the files copied to the local hard drive and are the changes made there?
   
2. Will the problem be solved when switching to SMB3?
   
3. What can be used as a "little blood" solution? Can NextCloud deploy, or the like?
   
4. Are there systems like NextCloud that support editing via Word \ Excel, and not the web?
   
5. If SharePoint, is it always commercial and expensive?
   

Answer 1

1. no. although there is some form of caching, it is unlikely that this is a complete copy of the file on the local disk; Microsoft's implementation is closed, so who the hell knows exactly how it works.
2. no.
3. You have a Windows file server, so the easiest way is to set up a regular Volume Shadow Copy on it, for example, with an interval of one hour or two hours. You reserve some volume on the disk and shadow copies will be created within this volume. This does not replace a backup. stored on the same server, but much faster than a backup, does not slow down the work during the day.
5. https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/SharePoint

Microsoft SharePoint Foundation is a free application to Windows Server; provides the basic infrastructure for collaboration: editing, storing documents, version control, etc. It also includes functionality such as document flow “routes” (workflow platform), task lists, reminders, online discussions.

Answer 2

Shadow copies for this exist and autosave in excel.

Is this how SMB2 works? Are the files copied to the local hard drive and are the changes made there?

SMB transfers information, maybe the whole file, maybe part of it. As you say, so be it.
Excel copies the file and works with it locally.

Will the problem be solved when switching to SMB3?

Of course not.

What can be used as a "little blood" solution? Can NextCloud deploy, or the like?

shadow copies.

Are there systems like NextCloud that support editing via Word \ Excel, and not the web?

Well, doesn't NextCloud support editing through Word?

If SharePoint, is it always commercial and expensive?

Well, yes.

Answer 3

The file history is not suitable, is it? It makes a separate file for each save.