Thank you for your assistance oh wise ones.

I thought "!~" is the same as "=~,"? I have debugged my code before, the bottelneck is definitely where the file is getting added to the zip file. Getting the files from the server takes but just a few seconds.

This is not going to speed things up but how do I spawn threads in Perl?

On the copying files, I like to create it locally first then copy it to my backup location and to the network sharedrive. I do this in case the fileserver is down, I will have a copy of it locally.