Offline Files with psts

[Broonie]

Hi There,

I've been reading the windows team blog on off-line files and been
directed to this group.

We have a problem with a particular user who uses off-line file on
Vista SP1 machine. One of the off-line files is a 85MB pst and its
causing a major problem as it's not syncing. After synchronisation of
the whole namespace takes place every other file is "available" except
this one. On a couple of ocasions I have manually synched that
particular file and it has synched OK but it eventually ends up
reverting back to a status of "not avaialble" after the user has
logged on a couple of times. I have to add that the user is logging in
over a VPN using a 3G card quite a lot.

The pst is also causing a synchronisation error with the .tmp file
that it creates once Outlook is opened - this sync error occurs even
when Outlook has been closed BTW, i could understand the error if
Outlook was still open and using it but it's not in this scenario.
There are several entries in the blog mentioned above that relate to
this problem but none of them were anwered - i guess the MS team
aren't prepared to admit they have got something fundamental like
excluding file types from synching wrong.

I'm not sure if the sync errors on the tmp file are related to the
actual problem of availability of the pst or not but it seems a bit of
a coincedence.

Finally, the blog also mentions that oplocking needs to be enabled on
the servers on which the files are stored for off-line files to work
with vista. On looking at the registry of both our files servers there
is no value for oplocking at all (either disabled or enabled). I'm not
quite sure how relevant this registyry entry is though as all the
other files sync fine.

Cheers

C

 

[daleeh]

As far as I knoiw, you can not "sync" pst files, nor any other
"database" type file. At least I never seen any way to do it except
through third-party apps specifically designed to handle PST's.

Dale

 

[Broonie]

As far as I knoiw, you can not "sync" pst files, nor any other
"database" type file.  At least I never seen any way to do it except
through third-party apps specifically designed to handle PST's.

Dale

Offline files on Vista is supposed to support large file types
such .pst and .mdb.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc749449.aspx

 

[daleeh]

Interesting technet article about Vista file sync. My suspicion is
that although it is "supposed" to work with a manual sync as long as
the file is not in use by Outlook, it may not be working as they
thought it would. I've run across many technet and other MS articles
that were written during the development phase of a product and the
article was never revised after the product was released and found to
be deficient in some areas. MS is not very good at correcting their
documentation when products don't live up to their hype.

Maybe you will get it to work properly, but you may have to run lots
of tests to find the "exact" conditions that allow it to live up to
expectations.

And by the way, it has nothing to do with "large" file types, but
rather with types that need to be "locked" when in use to protect data
integrity, which is why PST's and other database type files have never
been part of the MS offline file sync process.

Good luck

Dale