Bret,

Can't argue with your approach, I do that myself about half the time, except for the zipping part.

Nevertheless, I've got a lot of files to maintain and don't relish the idea of doing this for the rest of my life, would much rather have a routine that was effective, reasonably fast, and didn't involve "shovelling" the files back and forth on the wire.

FWIW, I've also considering writing a little daemon that would do this on a dedicated server. Would not really solve the network shovelling problem, but would be easy to do and would offload from the workstations.