Since upgrading to Windows 7, I've been dealing with an issue that automatically syncs network shares located on my home server computer that I DIDN'T setup to be available offline. And I can't figure out a way to permanently stop the shares from syncing without disabling offline files entirely, what I don't want to do. I have a server PC running Windows Home Server (Power Pack 2 installed), and 2 workstations running Win7 Ultimate. For whatever reason, Offline Files on the workstations keeps synchronizing my Videos and Music shares located on the Home Server, causing my local C: drive on each workstation to fill up. I have over 2 terabytes of music and video/TV and only 250GB of space on the workstations. I never setup Offline Files in Win7 to sync with the home server or its shares. Nor can I find a way to permanently stop the sync. If I manually browse the server (by going to \\homeserver\), then right-click on the Music or Video shares, I don't see the tab for Offline Files options, so I can't disable/uncheck it there. If I go to "Manage Offline Files" from the Sync Center, then to "View Offline Files", I try to manually delete the shares from there but they won't completely delete. It doesn't give me an error, it just doesn't delete all the offline folders. It starts the process, but it never completes. And several days later they all reappear again. In addition, Offline Files reports errors from time-to-time that it couldn't fully sync my Music and Video shares because the cache is full. I know the cache is full. I just want to stop it. The only thing I can think of is that I have Windows Media Center on the workstations configured to monitor the homeserver\videos and Music folders. BUT, that shouldn't have anything to do with making them available Offline. Windows shouldn't take it upon itself to make an entire network share available offline just because I want a program to monitor files in the share. If that's what's happening, it's unnecessary and frustrating because it devours useful space on my workstations drives. So my question is, how do I prevent Windows from automatically trying to make those two shares available offline??? They [the offline files] won't fully delete, and the Offline Files options are all gone when I right-click on the shares to disable/un-check.

Is it possible to first permanently disable offline sync in the GUI and verifying in services. Reboot. Then enable offline sync in GUI and see if it allows you to specify which folders to sync or not sync?http://blogs.technet.com/askds/archive/2009/03/12/how-to-properly-disable-offline-files-in-windows-vista.aspxjohn

I have exactly the same problem and am amazed that it is not more widely reported. This is 100% a significant security risk. What has hapenned here is that I have instaled vanilla Windows 7 and then mapped a network drive to another PC in order to retrieve one file from that PC. Microsoft has decided without informing or asking me that it will copy all the data from that network drive to my local PC. I can't begin to imagine the number of potential security incidents trawling and retrieving of data from other computers this feature might cause - let alone the potential breach of privacy laws. I'm going to report this in the security forum but from past experience deleting data from offline copies is a nightmare. Just read the blog linked above to get some ideas. If anyone knows how to get Windows 7 to only cache the files that I ask it to cache please let me know. Regards Adam

I have the same problem, i only want specific shares to be made offline, not other shares. Why has this important question not been answered yet?

No network share will be cached automatically unless the user clicks on Always available offline on the folder. The only exception to this is redirected folders. These are auto cached. But one can disable them using group policy settings for offline files. see How to disable offline files for redirected folders If you are not using offline files feature then it's better to disable it completey from 'manage offline files' window.

We have a similar problem. At my company we use offline files for the users personal network drive filder. This works well. But when the user is on a very slow connection say a bad 3G connection other network drives start to say that you have a slow connection and set the drive to Offline. And suddenly windows has a cached version of some files on that drive. This is not OK! We want to use the offline folders feature but ONLY where we say we want it.

We are seeing the same problem. We have a WIN2K3 server that is our file server. We are redirecting user folders to the server and they are being set up for offline file use. Great. What we are also seeing, though, is that files from a completely different share off the same server are also getting cached locally - and the user is NOT requesting that they be set up for offline use. This is causing us MAJOR headaches because we are finding that this then enables the scenario where user A, who has a file cached locally, edits that file in a similar timeframe to user B, who does not have the file cached locally. User B manages to update the network copy. User A effectively updates the cached copy and then Sync Center sulks because it doesn't know how to resolve the problem. This then requires cleanup work because staff don't understand what is going on. We cannot perform a wholesale turning off of offline caching for these shares because some staff do legitimately cache some of the files for offline use in order to make it easier for them to work away from the office. Has anyone been able to find a setting or GPO that can be used to stop this invisible intervention by Windows to cache files when it feels like it? Or is it a server issue? Does it only happen with Windows Server 2003?

The only method that proved to be succesful for us was to set the administratively assigned offline files policy to a path that has a different computer name then the path of the shares that you do not want to be put offline. We use dfs so it was pretty simple to do that. The shares that we wanted to be available offline we simply used not the dfs path for, but the original computer name. So \\dfspath\%username%$ became \\servername\%username%$ That prevented us from buying a separate fileserver meant for offline files use only.

Unfortunately, the suggested approach won't work for us. I don't want to prevent users from requesting offline caching as they will then understand the implications. What I want to stop is Windows 7 just making arbitrary files cached without the user asking them to be cached. It is causing a lot of headaches. Thanks.

Unfortunately, the suggested approach won't work for us. I don't want to prevent users from requesting offline caching as they will then understand the implications. What I want to stop is Windows 7 just making arbitrary files cached without the user asking them to be cached. It is causing a lot of headaches. Thanks. Hi Philip, Did you get any further with this? I have a very similar problem where I have Windows 7 caching files from Server 2003 for users regardless of GPO settings - the only solution I found was to set off-line settings on all shares on that server to "...will not be available offline." - this is, as per your post, not an acceptable solution to us. Any thoughts or additional information you have would be appreciated. Thanks, Carl

Hi, any news on this problem? We are having the same issue. best regards Philipp