Configuring Offline Files on the Server

When you create a shared folder on a Windows Server 2008 R2 file server, you also have the option of configuring Offline Files settings for items located within that folder. To do this, open the properties sheet for the shared folder and select the Sharing tab. Click Advanced Settings to open the Advanced Settings dialog box. Then click Caching to display the Offline Settings dialog box shown.

Three caching options are available for shared folders:

• Only The Files And Programs That Users Specify Are Available Offline This is the default setting and is used to configure manual caching of items in the folder. This means that if the user wants an item to be available offline, the user must manually select it to be made available offline by using one of the methods described earlier in this tutorial.
• No Files Or Programs From The Shared Folder Are Available Offline With this setting, no caching is performed. (Items in the shared folder cannot be made available offline.)
• All Files And Programs That Users Open From The Shared Folder Are Automatically Available Offline This setting is used to configure automatic caching of items, which means that every time a user accesses an item in the shared folder, the item will be made temporarily available offline on his computer. If you also select the Optimized For Performance option, all programs are cached automatically so that they can run locally. (This option is particularly useful for file servers that host applications because it reduces network traffic and improves server scalability.)

Note You can also select specific files to be cached automatically using Group Policy by enabling and configuring the Administratively Assigned Offline Files policy setting. For more information, see the next section of this tutorial titled "Managing Offline Files Using Group Policy."

When setting up an RUP or Folder Redirection server, one thing to consider is how to set the CSC settings on the share. RUP and Folder Redirection behave quite differently when used with CSC: RUP uses its own synchronization algorithm to keep the local copy in sync with the server, so it does not rely on CSC. As a best practice, Microsoft always recommends that you configure the RUP server to disable CSC (with the setting Files Or Programs From This Share Will Not Be Available Offline). Folder Redirection, on the other hand, depends heavily on CSC to provide synchronization between the client cache and the server. So the typical setting on a Folder Redirection share is manual caching (Only The Files Or Programs That Users Specify Are Available Offline). You don't need to set it to auto caching (All Files And Programs That Users Open From The Shared Folder Are Automatically Available Offline) because the Folder Redirection client side will pin the folder automatically so that it will always be available offline.

However, the preceding recommendation has an exception. Because Windows Vista and later versions and Windows XP have separate profiles in the server (the Windows Vista and later profile has a .v2 suffix), if you have both Windows XP and Windows Vista and later clients in your organization and have RUP deployed on both platforms, you can't share data between them. To share a specific folder between them, you can deploy a special folder redirection policy for Windows Vista and later client computers to redirect only a certain folder (such as Favorites) to the Windows XP RUP share. In this configuration, you cannot disable CSC entirely on the RUP share. Instead, you need to set up manual caching to let CSC work against this share for Windows Vista and later versions. Don't worry about RUP in Windows XP, though-RUP tries to keep the CSC out of the picture by bypassing CSC to talk directly to the server.