What the purpose of Athena?

The purpose of Athena is to independently, autonomously, back up important data in a user-configurable, dynamic cloud of nodes. Like its namesake, it strives to permit knowledge to spring fully formed from any location.

What is this cloud?

As opposed to the typical commercial concept of a cloud, Athena uses a "cloud" of personally-owned computers, or commercial cloud file space and NAS locations via proxy computer. Each of these spaces (nodes) can have a dissimilar topographic map of the network, yet work together to share information created on any computer which hosts an Athena service.

Why would I use it?

Let's say you're like me and working on a website. Unfortunately, you're away from home, and the "site" is on your laptop, or a different desktop. Typically, what you would have to do is FTP, email, thumb drive, cloud space, or otherwise manually copy the files to a sharable location. Here's how Athena is better than any of those:

FTP

Besides being clunky and archaic, FTP still requires you to manually monitor file changes, and push them yourself. Furthermore, it offers no provision for versioning, or, by default, encryption. Athena, on the other hand, is always encrypted, and can back up to multiple locations simultaneously with no user intervention. In addition, it offers both versioning and Mastering for each file in its system.

Email

Any site of any complexity at all is going to require multiple files. Be it simply the HTML and CSS files you're working with, you'll still need to zip them up or attach multiple files to an email. No one likes attaching things to emails. While they're universally accessible, they're also quickly outdated -- one character change and you're back at square one. Instead, with Athena, any change, large or small, is instantly and revocably saved not just to your local machine, but to every Athena node in the network.

Thumb / External Drive

Thumb drives and similar devices offer a great ability to cart files around between machines without having to copy files around all the time. However, the drawback is that you have to keep up with it. For those of us who misplace things or have a tendency to introduce electronics and liquids or flooring (which then quickly become implacable enemies), Athena is a godsend. With Athena, no matter where we save to, it's saved everywhere, instantly, securely, and versioned to boot.

What makes up an Athena ecosystem?

Athena is composed of two major parts: A client/server program which runs on all nodes or node proxies, and a protocol which permits extension of the official implementation to speak with other implementations of the Athena concept.

What is the Athena protocol?

The Athena protocol is defined in this document. Since Athena is still in alpha, this is a living document, subject to quick and regular change.

What is a "Node Proxy"?

A Node Proxy is a computer running the Athena client/server program which performs the tasks of a Node while interfacing with either cloud storage space or a NAS system -- these two spaces being "dumb" storage which could not otherwise be used by Athena. A Node Proxy can be run on the same machine as another Athena Node, simply on another port, or can be run on a dedicated machine. In terms of the network topology, it's simply another node.