acmeattic-devel team mailing list archive

[Bharath Subramanian Pichai <bharath.subramanian@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Jul 6, 2010 at 12:33 AM, Aditya Manthramurthy
<aditya.mmy@xxxxxxxxx>wrote:

>  On Monday 05 July 2010 10:34 PM, Karthik Swaminathan Nagaraj wrote:
>
> Hey Guys,
>       I was looking for use-cases and sharing models that AcmeAttic should
> provide. I came across interesting differences between the two famous online
> backup providers.
> I don't know if you guys have used DropBox, but paranoid I was I had never
> tried DropBox myself though I knew what it did.
> Let me summarize my findings.
>
> *DropBox:*
>
>    - Creates a 'DropBox' folder somewhere on your computer.
>    - Any file that you need to be backed up/synced needs to be put inside
>    your dropbox folder.
>    - Or, you can choose one folder to be your Dropbox folder
>    - All your clients would sync this dropbox folder between them
>
>
> *SpiderOak:*
>
>    - It recognizes all your clients individually by names (that you
>    assign)
>    - You can share *any* folder anywhere on your machine. These folders
>    can be disjoint. All sub-folders are implicitly shared.
>    - SpiderOak maintains all revisions for all the shared files/folders on
>    this machine.
>    - Every client has its *own* shared folders. These are *not* synced
>    among themselves by default (makes sense as they are different machines).
>    - You can always download any data from any of your clients.
>    - *Sync* is a separate feature in SpiderOak. You create a sync folder
>    by selecting two folders from two different machines (or a machine and a
>    external HDD)
>    - All files in this sync folder is synced between all machines. In
>    essence, this is an instance of a DropBox folder.
>    - You can create as many sync folders as you want.
>
> I have not explored the sharing feature as yet, but SpiderOak offers
> something called a ShareRoom which you can create and (possibly) pick
> files/folders to share.
>
> Bottom line: I think we should build our application based out of SpiderOak
> which is much more superior in terms of features. I like their share and
> sync model which cleanly separates the use-cases. Personally, I would find
> use for *both* those features.
>
> Did you guys know about these as yet? I am quite interested in framing up
> our application scenario first. Atleast a vague idea of the features.
>
>  Yeah, it does seem to be the case that SpiderOak has a lot more useful
> features, and their guarantee about security is much more believable than
> Dropbox's. While we can still pick and choose the features that we would
> like to implement, we need to pay close attention to designing the backend
> architecture that allows these features to be built.
>
> In particular, I would like to see the following high level features built
> in AcmeAttic: sync any folder on the client's filesystem with the attic,
> sync from multiple devices, download (and sync) files that were synced from
> a different machine. Encryption should be optional for specific files or
> folders (it should by default be encrypted, but the user can change this if
> required). Sharing should also be flexible, but I don't think we need to
> implement the feature of creating a shared virtual folder that can have any
> subset of files on the attic.
>
> --
> Aditya
>

I think, the attic should serve as a logical drive for the user over the
network like in the DropBox model. Suppose, the user syncs his files to the
attic from a client  (say, his laptop) to the attic. Now, the same user can
sync the files from attic to another client (in a specified path) and use it
as if it is just another folder on this client. Also, the user need not
place all the files in the "Attic" folder in his/her laptop (the first
client). Instead he can give symlinks/shortcuts to the folders and place it
in the "Attic" folder of the client.

Cheers,
Bharath