Windows offline folders syncronization to extended drive

1.) During my testing, there were cases where fetches would and would not occur. My setup was a mapped network drive to the DiskXtender Media Folder. DiskXtender 6.1 running on Windows 2003, SP1. My client was a Windows 2000 SP4 server.

I then enabled Offline Files on the 2000 SP4 machine for that mapped drive, opened the Offline Files folder on my desktop (on the 2000 SP4 machine) and forced a synchronize. No files were fetched during this process.

However, if a file is modified by someone other than the "offline" user, then written back out to media and purged, a synchronization from the user's machine, will force a fetch on the file so that it can be synchronized.

So basically, any files that have not been modified since the last synchronization will not be fetched. Any files that have been modified since the last synchronization will be fetched.

2.) In my setup, it was a mapped network drive, so it's really just pointing to a share on the DiskXtender Media Folder. To the user, the files look the same. What the user is looking at is just the file pointers, but this is transparent to the user. When the user goes to open the file, the file will be fetched on the DiskXtender server, and then opened on the user's machine.

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Dx has not been fully tested and certified with Windows Offline Files yet, and my testing was very high level.

I'd expect that you'll see files get fetched during forced and scheduled synchronizations. I'm not sure if there are other scenarios where files would get fetched, but I'm guessing there would be.

Keep in mind also that if there are ever any changes made to files directly on the Dx server, that the user's offline files folder will now contain 2 copies of the file. So, if a file gets renamed you will see both versions of the file. Additionally, if a file gets moved to another folder, then you may see problems trying to open that file, and may see a "could not locate file" type of message. I did some testing with this, and moved/renamed files directly on the Dx server to see what impact it would have on the end user. (I tested this on Dx and non-Dx machines, and the results were the same, so this is not a lack of functionality from Dx).

Due to some of the odd behavior I saw in just the minimal testing I performed, I'd recommend you stick with mapped network drives to user\home directories until Dx has been fully tested and certified with Windows Offline Files.