Recovering Offline Files form Cache

[ICT_GUY]

This worked for me, worked a treat in fact and made me look good too. I needed this after a teacher said she had backed up her files in her documents folder right before I removed her laptop from the network. She then came in this morning in a panic saying all her documents had disappeared .

 

So this got her documents back after the laptop had been removed from the network.

 

 

"How-To" Tutorials: How to restore Offline Files without Windows working

 

We had a situation where a customer had many files in her My Documents which was set to synchronize with her SBS server using Offline Files. Well, her Windows install crashed, and no matter what we tried, we could not get the existing Windows install to repair.

 

This was her home laptop, and she had not synchronized with the server for several months. For many of the files, the only copy was on her hard drive. But with offline files, it does not store them in their naitive format, it is some compressed format in the %SYSTEMROOT%\CSC directory.

 

After many days of trying to repair her Windows, we remembered using CSCCMD command to forcably remove local copies of offline files to network shares that no longer exist. We thought, maybe the same program can extract these files too... and it CAN!

 

csccmd.exe v1.1 download

 

You need to download version 1.1 of CSCCMD.EXE!

 

* Official MS Location requires contacting MPSS: Features and functions in version 1.1 of the Client-Side Caching Command-Line Options command-line tool

* Alternate location: http://www.jacksontechnical.com/pubfiles/csccmd_v1.1.zip

 

Use a working computer with the same version and service pack level of Windows XP.

 

Copy the %SYSTEMROOT%\CSC directory contents from the old hard drive to the same location on the working computer.

 

On the working machine, open a command prompt.

 

Type csccmd /enable

 

Create a target directory, for example C:\Restore

 

Type csccmd /extract /target:C:\Restore /recurse

 

Your files will be extracted from their compresses offline files format back to their original format!