Offline files, best way to set these up

[jimmy_2k]

Hi all,

 

I'm having some problems with offilne files and I need advice on the best way to manage them.

 

1. Users keep clicking the cancel button when the files start syncronising at log off. This of course causes the CSC folder to fill up. Can the cancel button be disabled?

 

2. Users keep filling up their home folders and I have one user who has managed to fill 19GBs of data in their home folder. She argues that she needs all the data, I need a way to set the offline cache to only syncronise users data which has been modified since it was last synced. You know the same way an incremental backup works by only backing up what has changed.

 

Thanks

 

J

[tommej]

We found offline files to more trouble than it's worth, we only use it for 'important' staff now. I don't think there is any way to disable the cancel button. Might be worth having a seperate folder inside the users home drive especially for offline files. Take a look at Volume Shadow Copy too!

[jimmy_2k]

Humm... thats what I was thinking, the problem is the users want to be able to access their files whereever they are, we do have a VPN for all users which is quite succesfull when users login correctly. We decided to redirect all users desktops to the My Documents folder as they keep on saving to the desktop and when their profile breaks they would loose their work (not to mention desktop login times). Problem is now if we turned off offline files when a user logged into a laptop without our network connection they would get an access denied message on login :-(

[tommej]

Have you looked into cached logins/credentials?

 

I'm unsure if this will help

[Ric_]

Offline files does only copy the changed files but, if your users have vast amounts of data and don't allow at least one full sync, you will never initialise the cache properly.

 

I think a good place to start would be to define what kinds of data the users should have - I suspect 19GB is a decent iTunes library - and implement quotas. If all your staff have 19GB of data and you have 100 staff, you will need 1.9TB of storage and backup space (without allowing for expansion)!