Caution when using offline folders!!!

Multiple choice question:

Scenario:
You copy some important data files to your server. You make that folder available offline. You realize that the .pst and .xls files are not getting backed up. You decide that you want to stop using the offline folder and change the folder back to "online" again.

Q: What happens to the folder on the server when you decide to turn off the "make available offline" option on that folder?

A) Windows deletes the cached files and folders from your local hard drive cache (\\%systemroot%\\csc) and reverts the server folder back to normal, just like it was before you turned on the "make available offline" option.

B) Windows deletes the cached files and folders from your local hard drive cache (\\%systemroot%\\csc) and also deletes the original files and folders from the server leaving you with total data loss.

If you answered B, you are correct. I have no idea why Microsoft decided that this would be the desired functionality.

I am in the process of recovering part of the data that I had moved to my server. I am unable to get the data off of the server, so I have lost all of the .pst, .xls, .mdb, etc. files. Those will have to be restored from my last backup. I powered off my machine right after this happened to prevent the unlinked NTFS files from being overwritten. I installed Windows 2000 to a second hard drive and installed a file recovery program to that hard drive and am in the process of copying over the CSC cache to my second hard drive. The only problem is that the CSC cache files are all numbered. I am guessing that the filenames were stored in the registry, so now I have 10,000 files with no filenames. The data (minus the .pst and .xls) is all there, but I have no idea which file is which.

Be cautious before you decide to turn off the "make available offline" It does warn you that it will delete files. I thought that meant that it was going to delete the cache, and not both the cache and originals.

You may ask why I didn't copy the server folder locally before I turned off the "make available offline" option. I tried to, and I backed up about half of the data when it hit a Favorites shortcut that had a very long filename. Since it couldn't copy that file, it aborted the rest of the copy. Why doesn't Microsoft just allow you to skip the copy of a certain file and continue on with the rest of the copy?

Anyhow, use caution and make frequent backups.



Tyler4/6/2003 8:17:14 AM

Excellent article. But I didn't see anything regarding using offline files to sync user's home directories that reside within a DFS enabled path.

Matt4/23/2002 11:04:06 AM

For clarification: when using automatic caching, you should be aware that simply browsing a folder in explorer considers that opening a file, unless you have turned off last access update at:[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\\SYSTEM\\CurrentControlSet\\Control\\FileSystem]
"NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate"=dword:00000001

Also, if the server that you have offline files on goes away, cleaning out the synchronization manager is a nightmare. Getting to your actual files can be cumbersome at best in this situation.

Doug Delaney 4/22/2002 11:10:42 AM

I can´t find any information regarding to the state "local copy date/time has been modified", which causes the synchronization to stop happening for the files in this state.

I´m facing this situation with some Excel files that I made available offline, but are changed by other people when I´m disconnected.

The only way I could find to restore the offline version was to clear the "make available offline" status, and then set it again, but this is not pratical.

Do you have any sugestions on that?

Thank you.

Ricardo De Paola 8/16/2001 9:01:23 PM

I had been enjoying off-line files on my laptop for some time, but now I can't get off-line files to work.
My system initially had NT and I dual-booted and life was good. I began to run out of space on my win2k partition so I ended up backuping and restoreing to a newly created c partition. My problem seems to be that I deleted the CSC folder during the process; I don't know why, and now everything is working fine, except off-line files. I tried the cachemov.exe and it errors out on "copying offline files cache" Got any ideas?

Kevin Martin 8/15/2001 2:13:07 PM