While working on a task to try and synchronize thousands of a users files using Windows’ Offline Files feature, I decided to investigate this feature more closely. I haven’t used offline files much, so while reading up on this feature I discovered that there are two kinds of offline files: Regular Offline Files, and Temporary Offline Files. The regular offline files are the ones that you specify to synchronize manually by right clicking on a file/folder and choosing “Make Available Offline”. These offline files are always available offline and there isn’t a limit to the amount of data you can synchronize this way. Temporary Offline files are a different story…[more]
Temporary Offline Files:
When users access their files sitting on servers on the network, these files are cached on the local disk (if the Offline Files Feature is active). They remain available when the portable computer is disconnected from the network.Upon reconnection on the network, the modified files will be resynchronized with their copy on the servers (According to the Offline files settings available thru Tools->Synchronize->Setup in any Windows explorer window). These kind of files are called temporary offline files. They are temporary in the sense that the cached copy might be erased locally after use. Usually files that have not been accessed recently will NOT be available while offline. The “Amount of disk space to use for temporary offline files” slider (seen below), applies only to these temporary offline files, NOT to the ones you manually specify.