Windows 7 Offline Files issue

gpn43

n00b
Joined
Sep 28, 2012
Messages
14
Hello,

I am having an issue that I can't seem to figure out. I inherited a network setup a few months ago. I was having issues where files on a user's home drive were not showing up when they would move PC's. After looking into this I realized that offline files are enabled by default in Windows 7 pro. I disabled this in group policy but for some user's, certain files in the c:\windows\csc directory do not exist on their home drive. Therefore, restoring these is a huge pain for me.

Am I completely missing something here? I have no reason to use off line files because this is a school and users are constantly using different PC's. Students are working on things on one PC and then not having access to it on other PC's. Could this just be residual? Perhaps programs cache the save path and are still dumping files in the c:\windows\csc path.

Any help here would be appreciated. This is a headache that I thought I resolved with disabling offline file sync.

Thanks
 
So I understand this you need users to be able to access files from any computer they log into?
 
How are the users home drives mapped? GPO, logon script, Home drive path in their AD object?
How are the users accessing their home drives? Is "My Documents" mapped to their home drive?

Also have to remember that the "User" folder on the desktop is a shortcut to Libraries now, and not their actual "My Documents" folder.

Offline files should have no effect on the files in a user's home drive.
 
Sorry for the delay, was out of town this weekend. In response to the questions - yes they need to access their files from any PC. The Home drives are mapped in the Home drive path in their AD object.

After looking into it further, it appears that not all files were being moved from the CSC folder to their home drive. An example is I had a user trying to retrieve files he saved about a week ago, but they were not in his home drive. They were saved on a PC before I applied the GPO to disable offline files. I went to the PC he used last week and the files were buried in the CSC cache under his name. The full file path would look like this "c:\Windows\CSC\v2.0.6\namespace\"fileserver"\data\%username%".

Since offline files is disabled now, it is working properly (i.e. - nothing is being cached in the csc directory, its just going strait up to their home drive). The issue now, and im afraid there is going to be no easy way to resolve it other than manually find and move the files, is that for files that were saved before the GPO disabling offline files was enforced are still possibly stuck in that cached local directory because they were never synced up to the home directory for the user.

Am I just screwed manually moving these for the situations that arise? Now that it is working correctly, I am sure in a couple weeks this will be blown over, but any ideas why it happened in the first place? Not sure why it was only some users and not all files, but has been a huge headache.

Thanks for the replies thus far.
 
I've used offline files and folder redirection with Windows 7, so I may be of some help to you.

The problem is possibly Windows 7 is not syncing the files from the offline database (Client Side Cache) to the server.

There are group policies that allow you to force syncing on log off. Keep in mind disabling the offline files setting only disables it for newly created profiles, not existing profiles. You will have to go into the share properties and disable offline files to totally wipe it out.

Users can initiate syncing by clicking on Sync Center and choosing to sync. You may want to also look into the registry setting that will automatically choose to keep latest version, etc., as there are many possible outcomes from syncing.

The Sync Center on Windows 7 is enabled if Offline Files is not turned off. That program will remain running on any user account that has already had it enabled. You have to either delete and recreate the profile or to format the CSC database on each machine with a registry setting (can be sent out with Active Directory via script or group policy preference, which is what I use).

To make a long story short, I've had problems with it in the past. I can see why it may be useful for some situations but I think for most people they will not want to use offline files.
 
Thanks for the replies. That all makes sense. Today has not been too bad, had to restore a couple files early, but it appears that it is not working properly. I'll definitely remember this in the future. I see no real need for users to use this feature here.

Thank you for the help.
 
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