People and Permissions

One of the questions that we've been discussing recently is the question of who should be able to see what in a multi-computer environment (e.g. a home or small office).

We spent time thinking through a number of approaches:

• each user could have private and public files (like the "shared folder" concept)
• Pros - easy to mix private and public
• Cons - Requires the user to organize their work in a specific way
  
• different computers could encrypt files differently so that even the administrator could not access a user's files
• Pros - One user can be completely private from the administrator
• Cons - A user can be completely private from the administrator, accessing files remotely becomes difficult
  
• there could be an "administrator" class and a "limited" class of users with administrator class being able to do everything and limited users only being able to see their files
• Pros - This is familiar model. In a high-trust environment everyone can have administrator rights. In a privacy-conscious environment there can be one administrator and a series of limited users. For total privacy, each user should have their own account.
  
• Cons - There's no way, other than separate accounts, for a limited user to protect their data from the administrator.
  

In the end, we decided to opt for the two classes of user because:

1. It is simple to understand
2. It covers several key situations well:
• a small business owner and a number of staff
• a family where someone takes care of the computer(s) and other family members are users
• a small business with an IT person
  
3. It is straightforward to implement all of the Athena Backup features in this context

You can look forward to seeing this feature released in the next month or two!

Andrew.

Extending Online Backup

Once your files are on a remote server there are some really useful things that can be done with those files. We've been working to get these capabilities out to Athena Backup users.

Here are some of the useful new features that we're working on for Athena Backup.

Basic file access can be provided via a web page. This is great to allow retrieve a specific file by drilling down through a set of folders when you're somewhere else (e.g. work) and you need to get a file from your computer at home (or vice-versa). Here's a screenshot of a prototype Athena Backup website viewing files.




The next level of functionality is for the system to understand more about the files. Providing a search by file type and/or date, especially across multiple computers allows users to easily find the file they're looking for, especially when it isn't obvious where it is. Here's a screen shot of a prototype of the web-based searching functionality for Athena Backup.



The level of functionality beyond this is to allow users to do useful things with their online files like creating albums and allowing people to link to files, etc... Here's a screenshot of Athena Backup showing the files found in thumbnail view. From here they will be able to be added to albums, emailed, etc...



All of these feature are planned for release next month. Stay tuned for more!