I took a look at the Hide-It program's website. Sailorman, I'm not sure
how much network administration you do on a daily basis, but comparing
Cloak to Hide-It is like the old Apples to Oranges debate...
Hide-it appears to be more of a home/consumer-based product where you
have a PC or a small workgroup. Cloak is designed for enterprise
networks where you have a lot of users connecting to one or more file
servers.
The biggest difference is that there is almost nothing to configure
with Cloak -- it simply relies on the security of NTFS that business
networks already have in place to give it direction. To dumb this down,
it provides Novell/Linux-like behavior to the Microsoft world.
With Hide-It, it appears that you must create a special/secret folder
and then grant/deny access to specific users/groups. This concept is
not new -- it has been around for a long time... Just do a seach for
"hide files" in Google and you'll see that there are a number of
cmpanies that make these consumer-oriented products. Here are just a
few:
http://www.baxbex.com/products.html?gc=fse1#foldershield
http://www.newsoftwares.net/folderlock/?id=gd
http://www.winability.com/folderguard/?src=g5&ctx=_hide_files_
http://www.magicfolders.com/
From what I can tell, the Cloak product is unique in its
implementation. Correct me if you think I'm wrong.
-Brian