I am very familiar with reimaging machines from a central server, booting machines off of remote images, and roving profiles. All were in use before this technology. None fits the claims of the patent in any way. The key point of the patent being that it lets you get incremental updates to software whenever you want. The incremental bits avoids having to copy the whole thing, which is important when your connections aren't that good.

Incidentally rsync was publicly announced in 1996 so I very strongly doubt that they were using it in 1995.