I am in the process of designing a portion of a website that will allow users to convert documents to a particular format by either:
  1. Point to a file resource via URI (i.e. http://www.foo.com/foo.pdf)
    2. or
  2. Upload a file to the server for server-side conversion
When the server is pointed to a remote resource, I can convert that, and this part works today without any problems.

I want to add the capability of having the users upload a file from their local system to the server for conversion (limited by $maxsize, of course). The hitch here is that I need to provide a way for the users to be able to delete the file from the server after they've uploaded it. I don't want to deal with the hassle (or risk) of housing their data on my server, or that they think it's insecure (we all know it is).

Yes, I could easily just copy the file where the script can't find it at deletion time, and they'd "think" it was deleted, but I'm not maliscious like that. It's a matter of policy as well as implementation.

Has anyone done something like this? I have a few approaches:

  1. Common upload/ftp directory, bad.
  2. Browser-based file upload with browser-based deletion
  3. Login:pass authentication to their "account" on the server, where their uploaded files exist (something like FreeDrive or similar places) and then they can add/delete into their "account" as necessary.

In reply to Browser-based file uploads and deletions for a by hacker

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.