Hi all. For all these years I'vec never paid much attention to OfflineFiles. At this point I know I need to. My typical environment is a domain under 2008 R2 with Windows 7 Pro clients.
I will do my basic reading to get familiar but right now I have a real world scenario that I suspect won't quickly be answers by documentation.
I have a user with a Win 7 desktop, domain-joined. I recently built for him a laptop, also Wni 7 Pro, domain-joined. I think it only logged in twice perhaps but it worked. Two days later they went offsite for a week. This also calls into question my lack of full knoweldge on cached credentials though...but here's what I wonder:
If they log in using the domain creds, should they always be able to log into the computer, even though the domain server is nowhere nearby? (since they're offsite). Or why does it work like that sometimes and gives no errors, yet other times it logs on but says it can't contact the server so is using a temporary profile?
What happens to any files created during being logged into this temporary profile? Would they sync to the domain profile once the user is next properly logged on?
We are using folder redirection for everything in the domain, so Desektop, Documents, Favorites, everything supported by 2008R2/Win7 redirection is set to do so. So all desktop contents are on the server in a share - if the user is offsite, what is the expected behavior?
One other note is that today as I logged into their laptop, now that it is at the office and on the domain network, it is doing 100's of MB of "sync" activity. The Sync Center has been chugging along for someting like an hour so far, and the NIC stats are showing so far over 1GB of data transfer (nothing else is really happening, WSUS and our antivirus definitions might be it but even then I suspect those are not doing this as this laptop was fully updated). Plus the Sync Center is actually psinning showing a sync in progress.
My questions on this are:
What is it syncing? The user's redirected folders, their network share contents, Outlook cache or something? When I first booted their laptop, I went to a network share and couldn't see any files - upon reboot it showed them. Other shares were fine, all are located in the same server volumes - this was just a display issue and the first time I've seen it happen (and the first time I've seen heavy sync activity, hence my suspicion that sync somehow did that).
Last question, sorry for the bombardment, but does logging out or rebooting cause the Sync Center syncing to restart from the beginning, or does it know to pick up where it left off?
I'd love to see all my questions answered, but will be grateful if even one of them is as it takes me closer to understanding this stuff more so than not. Thank you very much.