Entryway

The Problem

If you own a PC or a laptop computer, or you operate one at work, the chances are that you're faced with the increasingly intractable problem of how to cope with the deluge of files you want to store on your computer.

The explosion in the availability of cheap processing power and digital storage means that many users have already accumulated collections of tens of thousands of digital images, video clips, audio downloads and other digital files. More advanced users are distributing full length movies across the Internet or downloading them from web sites.

Whether you like it or not, your PC has become a digital repository, but the current lack of suitable tools and systems for managing digital information means that it's more like a digital rubbish dump.

Over the last few years there has been a great deal of work on the problems of managing large-scale digital repositories. These problems are now affecting everyone.

• "You can't find anything" (since there are considerable problems in the classification, cataloguing and content indexing of non-text digital objects).
• "There's no access control" (or rather, there's little or no access control and what there is is usually bypassed or ignored).
• "Commercial lock-in" to proprietary technology, tools and software means that you can lose access to your stored digital data for a wide variety of other reasons.
• The ability to connect any computer to the Internet has now raised another threat to stored digital information - that of a physical attack from "outside".
• What is now being characterised as a requirement for "continuity of access" over considerable periods of time, is now beginning to impact on the whole world.

The Checkpoint Solution

Tackling all of these problems in the commercial world requires an extensive range of packages which together make up two Checkpoint Information Management System Suites. These are described and documented elsewhere.

The essential tool for implementing any set of these packages is Checkpoint Commander.

The normal home user, or someone operating a laptop, or workstation in a SOHO environment, can solve the majority of their information management problems by using Checkpoint Commander in stand-alone mode. However, for larger collections and more sophisticated uses, extended facilites may be needed. In this case Checkpoint Commander may be upgraded to the full Checkpoint platform architecture.

Checkpoint Commander

Checkpoint Commander offers several methods for searching through your files, and their contents, in order to classify them into a series of 'collections' of related files, which you define. You can then build up a set of 'references' to the files in a collection - a result set. This allows you to navigate around the files, wherever they are located, on any of the storage devices attached to your computer.

Checkpoint Commander has a built-in set of internal viewers, helper applications, and facilities for linking with external helper applications as described in Plugins and helper applications. Among other things this enables you to:

• View text, image, and HTML files, and track through result sets containing them.
• Play audio files, and track through result sets containing them, including result sets saved as XSPF playlist files.
• Play video files by linking to external video players, and particularly VLC media player which can track through result sets saved as XSPF playlist files.

You can amend and re-arrange result sets, and save them for later re-use. Since a reference to a file can be in any number of result sets, a file can be in as many collections as you like. This provides a solution to the well-known problem of trying to arrange files in folder trees, where you would would like to put files into two or more distinct trees, and could otherwise only do that by replicating files.
[NOTE] We are using the word 'collection' in a different sense than is common. Perhaps we ought to call these things "virtual collections".

The basic method of organising files into folder trees is based on the idea of putting related files into the same folder, so that you can find them again because they are "all in the same place". This leads to the idea of putting them into some form of 'container' file. The container can then be moved from place to place within the disk storage, and access control to the files in the container can be implemented by encrypting the files with an encryption key specific to the the container. Perhaps the most well-known example of this is an encrypted "zip file". [NB. the "classic" PKZIP zip-file encryption mechanism is insecure [101].] Checkpoint Commander can be used to create and maintain a special kind of container known as a Checkpoint archive. By convention these are known as 'CPA' files. CPAs can be strongly encrypted using 256-bit AES encryption.

Checkpoint Commander allows files to be classified in many collections regardless of their physical locations. This applies even though some, or all, of the files are physically inside CPAs, and regardless of whether these CPAs are encrypted or not.

This means that users can view files, and play audio and video files both singly and using stored result sets / playlists, without unpacking them from inside encrypted CPAs. This is a strong security feature.

Checkpoint Commander also provides further security features, including secure wiping of unwanted files and the ability to securely wipe all the free space on any storage device.

Checkpoint Commander versions

Checkpoint Commander uses, and installs if it's not there already, a general-purpose framework called the Checkpoint Architecture. This framework (or core architecture) is the basis for implementing the two Checkpoint Information Management System Suites.

Two versions of Checkpoint Commander are available. Checkpoint Commander Standard is the stand-alone version; it's full-featured but does not interact with the Checkpoint suites. Checkpoint Commander Plus contains extra functionality to interface with the Checkpoint Daemon and the Checkpoint suites. The Checkpoint Commander Plus extensions have a chapter of their own in the full Checkpoint documentation. The rest of this guide applies to both versions.