In trying to set up a highly custom periodic folder synchronization setup for synching a directory on an XP machine to an NFS export on a remote (debian) box, I've become... contemplative, and am second guessing myself (partially because I'm more a developer than a systems guy, and you don't know what you don't know, you know?).
The network is assumed to be highly unreliable, and network bandwidth is at a premium and these files can be quite large. I have zero control over the export or the remote machine hosting it (so I can't set up some sort of custom daemon there), but I can do as much computation on the XP side as I want to.
The solution I came up with was to compare file size ( L bytes locally, R bytes remotely), and only append transmit (L-R) bytes to each file (i.e., to send only the delta).
My questions are twofold:
1) I don't want to reinvent the wheel. Is there a better, standard way that I can perform this operation reliably? Because I'm not sure if I really want the answer to #2 ;)
2) If this sounds like a fine solution, what are some more off-beat edge cases, things to guard, etc.?
Thank you in advance!