Offline files question

[Matthew]

Hi. Sorry if I over cross-posted!

I have one staff member who travels a lot, and she has historically manually
copied her entire (2GB) User directory to her (XP) laptop before travelling.

Over a few years, this resulted in about five different versions of her
directory, a situation I want to prevent from happening again.

So I looked into enabling offline files, the theory being that there would
be an intelligent process managing the syncronization of files between her
laptop and the server (Small Business Server 2003).

However, when I enable this and open the Offline Files Folder, what we see
is an unordered list of a gazillion files, not at all in their heirarchical
directory structure. It's impossible to find something like this.

Is there a better solution? Are we not using Offline Files properly? If
she copies her entire directory

Any input is greatly appreciated!

Thanks,

Matthew

 

[Dave Nickason [SBS MVP]]

Offline Files should be transparent to the user. For example, if you access
a redirected My Documents directory on the server when connected to the LAN,
when you're working offline you'll still go to File -> Open. You'll see the
same thing you do when connected to the LAN, but under the covers, you'll be
accessing offline copies of the files.

IMO the only real trick is that if a user has both a laptop and a desktop,
it's important to sync the laptop after traveling, before starting to work
on the desktop. Windows can deal with sync conflicts fairly well, but it's
still easier if you just avoid the conflicts in the first place.

You don't really need to access the files where you are in Windows Explorer
unless you're troubleshooting, or maybe trying to recover a file that's been
deleted from it's main location.

 

[Matthew]

Wow, so basic, I never even thought to look in My Documents!! They're all
there!! That's how it's supposed to work. Thank you for pointing out the
obvious to me!

Matthew

 

[Toni]

En/na Matthew ha escrit:

I have one staff member who travels a lot, and she has historically manually
copied her entire (2GB) User directory to her (XP) laptop before travelling.

Over a few years, this resulted in about five different versions of her
directory, a situation I want to prevent from happening again.

So I looked into enabling offline files, ...

Is there a better solution?

Yes, use Portable Unison <http://www.portablefreeware.com/?id=979>. Not
easy to setup unless you know how to manually edit config files but will
do the job nicely and flawlessly. RTFM, it is intuitive for the user but
not for the administrator.

It will also allow her to see when she has double-modified a file and
decide which version to keep (or both).

 

[Larry Struckmeyer [SBS-MVP]]

Hi Mathew:

Some users find this a PITA. Not sure why, but it sometimes is. MS has a
utility from the sys internals group called sync toy:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...54-C975-4814-9649-CCE41AF06EB7&displaylang=en

cool utility to allow you to keep folders in sync. You have to check in,
check out manually, but it is very quick and has no impact on the user
experience for a normal log in / out, just when they want to check out files
for a longer time away.

 

[Dave Nickason [SBS MVP]]

I agree that a lot of people seem to report problems with offline files, but
I've got to say I've never had a problem with it here. I use it on about 30
XP and Vista client PCs (Vista syncs in the background and it's much better
than XP in that regard).

My only complaint is that I wish that for shared computers, you could set
some users to sync and others not. I have to disable sync on the shared
computers in conference rooms, or I end up with no free space due to
everyone's redirected docs synching.

Any sync problem I've ever seen are fixed by either deleting the offline
files and re-synching, or hard resetting the cache (ctrl+shift when clicking
the Delete button).

 

[Matthew]

Wow, these are all great suggestions, thanks, everyone!!

Matthew