A while back I posted my solution for Synchronizing files over the Internet. And even though it works, it is still way too slow for me (it takes a god awful long time to scan the server side files for changes). So I started my search for a faster solution again. While googling for a windows program that does the same thing rsync does for Unix I found something better: a Windows version of rsync. This isn’t one of those boring cygwin compiles of rsync that burdens you with the whole cygwin side effects (well, probably it IS just a cygwin compile, but the frontend takes away any “residue” of that).
Anyway, now I’ve got a rsync server running under Linux on the Internet, and my clients have the Windows rsync client that gets run automatically every 30 min. It’s simply blazing fast since the server and clients can independently calculate any changes in files and the network (bottleneck) is just used to transfer what was changed in the files (and minimal file information).