Offline Files - Unsyncing a single user

[Sean]

We have Offline Files set up so that whenever a staff user logs onto a laptop their homearea syncs with it and is stored in the offline file store, which is great

What's not so great though are situations like the one that has occurred recently - my colleague in the department was on annual leave and had left her laptop on her desk when a user came in in a flap and needed to get logged onto something, so we logged her my colleague's laptop.

Unfortunately, when my colleague returned, she found that the remaining 20Gb of her mSATA SSD had all been used up with this user's synced home area

 

So we had a look and, making sure the laptop was disconnected from the network so we knew we were defiantly just working with the offline versions, we navigated through the Sync Centre and deleted the files we didn't want to be synced to my colleagues laptop

Unfortunately, when my colleague's laptop was re-connected to the network, synced and then the users own laptop also synced the user still found that we'd managed to delete her files!

 

So is there a safe way to 'surgically' break sync partnerships with users homeareas without accidentally deleting the ONLINE copies of their files? This is something that's always bugged me about offline file sync

This is Win7 clients with Win 2012 servers, by the way

Thanks

Sean

[sted]

you can delete offline files as a batch in the interface but im not sure if they will resync or not

[Sagima]

REG ADD HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\CSC\Parameters /v FormatDatabase /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f

 

Wipes sync of all local offline files but doesn't do anything to the server side

[Sean]

Right, yeah, I have a MS 'FixIt' that does that, I tried it and, having resynced her own files, my colleague's laptop now seems to be back in the desired state

It would have been nice to have some way of sorting these situations out without the regular user having to re-sync their stuff but thanks for confirming there isn't, at least I can stop trying to work how to do that now...

[jmak]

I usually delete the user's profile on the client - i.e. the person who borrowed it. That way it leaves the "owner's" data intact and won't sync the temporary user's files back when it connects to the domain again.