Working with Windows 7 laptops, folder redirection and offline files - my experience

Working with Folder Redirection on laptops with offline files can be very challenging because laptops can be in a few different scenarios and they are need to be taken care of.  They can be:

1.  docked in the office and connected to LAN.
2.  undocked in the office and connected to wireless network at work
3.  undocked, lid close, brought it home, connect to home wireless and VPN into work.
4.  undocked, shutdown and VPN from home.

Let's look at each scenario closely.

Scenario 1:  docked in the office and connected to LAN.
Well, this one is easy.  Nothing really needs to be changed to make this work.  When laptop is connected to a fast network, the offline files should be online. 
The following group policy settings in Administrative Templates | Network | Offline Files should be set:
- Allow or Disallow use of Offline Files feature = Enable
- Configure Background Sync = (it varies, set to suit your environment)
- Enable Transparent Caching = 60ms  (varies, we set to 60ms in our situation)

Scenario 2:  Undocked in the office and connected to wireless network at work.
Okay, depending on your internal wifi setup, this one could be a bit tricky./  In our situation, this one would pretty much falls into scenario because our wifi setup is pretty good and the latency is very low.

Scenario 3:  Undocked, lid close, brought it home, open lid,  connect to home wireless and VPN into work.
In this situation, user is not log off when they bring their laptop home.  So, most likely the offline file status would show Offline (Not connected) when they open the lid.  User will launch their VPN application and establish a connection back to work.  As soon as the connection is established, the status will go 'online'.  Okay, this is going to be an issue, because your home Internet connection might be slow especially if you are using wireless at home and when you try to copy something to your local desktop, guess what?  slow as hell... because everything you copy to the desktop is actually being redirected to the network share.  So, to get around this problem, we need to configure the 'Slowlink mode' settings..  The trick is to figure out what is the right value for latency or bandwidth..  In our case, we utilize 'latency' to distinguish between an acceptable network connection and a slow network connection.  This is a good article for determining the latency of the network.  The following group policies are applied to Laptops OU.  Anything about 60ms will be considered as slow link.
Computer Configuration | Administrative Templates | Network | Offline Files
- Configure slow-link mode.  UNC = \\server1\share1\*    Value = Latency=60

Scenario 4: undocked, shutdown and VPN from home.
This scenario would be very similar to scenario 3.  The only difference is that user has the laptop shutdown and bring it home.  So, when user start it up at home, user will login with their cache credential.  At this stage the offline file status would be "Offline (Not connected)", user will initiate the VPN session and connect to the network, once it is connected to the network, depending on the speed, if latency is set correctly (see Scenario 3) and falls above 60ms, the offline status will change to "Offline (Slow-link)", otherwise it will stay online if the latency is less than 60ms.

Another option to explore is to define the throughput (bits per second).  E.g.  Throughput=10000
or even a combination of both.  Value Name="*" Value="Throughput=10000, Latency=50

Resetting Offline File Cache in Windows 7

When you enabled Folder Redirection with offline files, one of the benefits is that user do not have to wait for the files to be copied over to the network before they are able to access their desktop.  When you have offline files enabled, during the logon process, the files in your folders will be copied to local cache (c:\windows\csc), once completed, it will create the folder structures on the network and users will have access to the desktop.  The background sync will happen shortly after and the local cache will sync the files to the redirected folders. 

However, there are times where your local offline cache is corrupted due to various reason and you will run into all sorts of sync issues.  The only way to fix this is to blow away the local cache and have folder redirection sync the files from local folders again.  The way to do this is:

-  With admin privillege, start Registry editor.
-  Navigate to  HKLM | System | CurrentControlSet | Services | CSC | Parameters
-  Create a new key of "FormatDatabase"   REG_DWORD
-  Assign the value "1"
-  Reboot the machine.

After the reboot, check the "Offline files" in the Sync Center, it should be empty.  Also, the above key should be removed after the reboot. 

You will not have a fresh empty copy of the local cache database and the sync issue would be resolved (hopefully...)

Location of My Documents Folder - Folder Redirection

The path to the My Documents folder is stored in the following registry key, where path is the complete path to your storage location:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell Folders

Value Name: Personal
Value Type: REG_SZ
Value Data: path

Any modification from the default is recorded in the following location and the path listed earlier is also updated:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders

Value Name: Personal
Value Type: REG_SZ
Value Data: path

If the administrator redirects My Documents by using group policy folder redirection, the path is present in this value and the option to modify the location of the My Documents folder is not available when you view properties of the My Documents folder.

Enabling Folder Redirection Logging to gather verbose troubleshooting

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/907355

To enable Folder Redirection logging for troubleshooting purposes.  Create a registry key under:
(Please note this only applies to pre-Windows Vista machines)

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Diagnostics

New DWORD   |  FdeployDebugLevel

0000000F for verbose logging

00000000 for normal logging

The log files will be located at %windir%\debug\usermode\fdeploy.log

For Windows Vista and above, the logs will be in the application log or go straight into the Windows component, Folder Redirection log.

Re-initialize offline file cache and database

There are times when the offiline file cache gets corrupted and you will need to rebuild or re-initialise the cache database.  Microsoft has published a KB Article regarding to this.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/230738