Offline Files no longer works: Access is denied

[SchoolTech]

I have a user who is on a laptop who uses Offline Files. We changed our
servers and the old server was no longer available, yet Offline Files
kept trying to connect to it.

After a lot of effort trying to get Offline Files to stop trying to
synchronise with the non existent server, I found the KB article that
tells you how to re-initialise the offline files cache and database,
Q230738.

I followed the steps in the first method. However, when I tried to make
their My Documents folder offline, which is redirected by Group Policy
to a network share, every single file on the network share gets an
"Access denied" error. The text of the specific error message displayed
by the Offline Files user interface is:

Offline files ([Share pathname]): Unable to make [folder name] on
[server share] available offline: Access is denied.

The user has full control over the files and folders in this path and is
also the owner of these files. The user is also a local administrator of
their computer so this message should not be related to ACL permissions.

How do I get Offline Files working again for this user? For some reason
it has not automatically made the redirected shares available for this
user, as normally that is the default setting. We have not changed any
Group Policy settings, and the computer has Windows XP SP2 and all
patches applied.

 

[jay.barton]

I have a user who is on a laptop who uses Offline Files. We changed our
servers and the old server was no longer available, yet Offline Files
kept trying to connect to it.

After a lot of effort trying to get Offline Files to stop trying to
synchronise with the non existent server, I found the KB article that
tells you how to re-initialise the offline files cache and database,
Q230738.

I had same problem, so i deleted offline files and cache, by holding
CTRL and clicking delete button, this deleted the cache, i then turned
off offline files, and restarted the machine, i logged in as
administrator, logged off, logged in as the user, turned back on
offline files and within an instant it was automatically sync'ing
files. hope this works for you too.

jay

 

[SchoolTech]

I had same problem, so i deleted offline files and cache, by holding
CTRL and clicking delete button, this deleted the cache, i then turned
off offline files, and restarted the machine, i logged in as
administrator, logged off, logged in as the user, turned back on
offline files and within an instant it was automatically sync'ing
files. hope this works for you too.

jay

As I've noted, after re-initialising the cache, it no longer works due
to the Access Denied errors.

Can't find anything about this on MS's website.

In general I've found Offline Files extremely frustrating to use.
Conceptually it is a great idea; implementationally it suffers from
being overly complex and poorly documented/supported.

An example is the specialised tools, which cannot be downloaded from MS
- CSCsniff and CSCCMD1.1. I got the latter off a website that someone
had put it onto. By the time you are at the point of having to use the
specialised tools the documentation gets even more specialised and
complex. There is a whole heap of functionality/configuration that the
user interface does not expose which has to be done with the specialised
command line tools. The standard documentation is hard enough to
understand at times.