METHOD AND DEVICE FOR FILE TRANSFER BY CASCADE RELEASE

A method and apparatus for transferring data files to several computers on a network is disclosed. The cascade release maintains a list of computers to which the file is to be distributed. This list is subdivided and only the first computers on the lists are transferred the file and the subdivided list. These computers themselves take the subdivided list and further subdivide it and transfer the file to the computers now first on the new lists. This continues until all computers receive the distributed file. In order to ensure the integrity of transfer, an initial checksum is compared to the checksum of the transferred files.