Patent ID: 8065673

Claim:
A method comprising: displaying by a local computing device, user selectable options related to maintaining copies of documents stored on a storage media of a remote computing device on a storage media of the local computing device, wherein the copies of the documents stored on the local computing device are referenced by one or more selectable links presented by the local computing device, the selectable links comprising a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) and a plurality of off-line reading properties, the plurality of off-line reading properties comprising: an update checking property, a local caching property, a number of levels deep property, and a download dependencies property; in response to a user selecting one or more documents stored on the remote computing device and setting the update checking property, scheduling an update check of the documents stored on the remote computing device, wherein the update check comprises: retrieving a listing of properties associated with a particular document of the one or more documents stored on the remote computing device; determining if the listing of properties describes differences between the particular document stored on the remote computing device and a corresponding copy of the particular document stored on the local computing device; responsive to the listing of properties not describing a difference or being unavailable, calculating a Cyclical Redundancy Check (CRC) checksum for the particular document stored on the remote computing device; determining if the particular document stored on the remote computing device is different than the copy of the particular document stored on the local computing device using the listing of properties and the CRC checksum; responsive to determining that the particular document stored on the remote computing device has changed, storing on a storage medium associated with the local computing device, a copy of the particular document stored on the remote computing device; accepting user input specifying that the update check should be performed when a network connection on the local computing device is determined to be idle, wherein the update check occurs when the network connection has been idle longer than an idle time threshold interval, wherein documents on the remote computing device that have short expected durations of download time are copied at a beginning of an idle period and documents on the remote computing device that have long expected durations of download time are copied after the idle period has exceeded a predefined idle time threshold interval; and responsive to an affirmative value of the download dependencies property, downloading from the remote computing device and storing on a storage medium associated with the local computing device, a copy of resources related to the particular document stored on the remote computing device.