Abstract: The present invention provides a system and method for efficiently transferring files using file differentiation. In architecture, the system includes a client device with a device file, a server device containing an original file and a revision file of the original file, and a delta file that identifies only the changes between the original file and the revision file. The present invention can also be viewed as a method for efficiently transferring files using file differentiation. The method operates by (1) providing an original file; (2) creating a revision file of the original file; and (3) generating a delta file that identifies only the changes between the original file and the revision file.

Abstract: The present invention provides a “data centric” approach to updating databases on computer systems of an intermittently connected database system. In this approach, the storage and processing complexity of the database server are de-coupled from the number of clients to be supported, thereby, improving the scalability of the server. Instead of focusing on the data required by individual clients, this method tracks changes to data subsets pertaining to groups of clients. Thus, the server need only track and record changes to these subsets of data, instead of tracking changes for individual clients. Clients download the subsets, which contain the data relevant to the group, and merges data or deletes superfluous data from the subsets. Since the server is tracking a limited set of data subsets related to groups of clients instead of the actual number of the clients, the overall scalability of the system is increased.