Managing Offline Files Using the Offline Files Control Panel

Users of unmanaged computers can configure their Offline Files settings using the Offline Files Control Panel tool. On managed networks where Group Policy is used to manage Offine Files settings for users' computers, configuration settings in the Offline Files Control Panel on users' computers will appear dimmed (unavailable). For more information on Group Policy settings for managing Offline Files, see the section titled "Managing Offline Files Using Group Policy" later in this tutorial.

The Offline Files Control Panel tool includes the following four tabs:

• General Lets you enable or disable Offline Files on the computer, open Sync Center, and view all offline files on your computer, including files in SMB shared folders, DFS scopes, and mapped network drives. Note that Offline Files is enabled by default on Windows Vista and later versions.
• Disk Usage Lets you view and configure the total disk space used by Offline Files on your computer and the space available for temporary offline files. You also can use this tab to delete all temporary offline files on your computer. Note that All Offline Files refers to both automatically cached and manually cached offline files, whereas Temporary Offline Files refers only to automatically cached files.
• Encryption Lets you encrypt or unencrypt the local cache on your computer using EFS. Note that you can encrypt only the locally cached versions of these files, not their network versions.
• Network Lets you see whether Offline Files slow-link mode has been enabled for your computer and how often your computer checks the connection speed after you manually transition to online mode. Note that the user cannot configure the settings on this tab directly; slow-link settings can be configured only by using Group Policy.

Note Windows Vista and later versions index offline files by default. Indexing of offline files can be toggled on and off by using the Indexing Options Control Panel.