If the user who made the shares offline can access the machine then recovering the files is pretty easy. Open Explorer from the user’s login account, click on Tools in the menu bar, click on Folder options and then offline files tab. Now click on ‘View Offline files‘ tab. It opens Offline Files folder, select all the files, open some other folder on the local drive and paste the files there.
If the above method does not work then we have this offline files managing tool called CSCCMD.EXE. Using this tool we can restore the files by just running a single command from command line. Let’s see how to do it.
Let’s say you want to recover the files to C:docs directory then we can do this by running the below command
csccmd.exe /extract /target:c:docs /recurse
If you want to recover files that belong to a particular server and share you can specify that too using /extract switch.
csccmd.exe /extract:servershare /target:c:docs /recurse
If you want to extract only the files that are modified locally then you can add /onlymodified switch to the command.
csccmd.exe /extrace:servershare /target:c:docs /recurse /onlymodified
If the offline files metadata or index files get corrupted then csccmd.exe may not work. In that case the only option left out is to recover the files manually as described in How to recover offline files when the cache is corrupted
Note:
- /extract option is not available with CSCCMD.EXE 1.0. It’s available only in the latest version i.e CSCCMD.EXE 1.1 . This can be downloaded from //www.jacksontechnical.com/pubfiles/csccmd_v1.1.zip
- This tools works on XP and Server 2003 only. This is not supported for Vista and Windows 7 operating systems.