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Unable to Merge Offline Changes


Nocebo

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Hello All,

Long time fan of MSFN, the Unattended guide is excellent, this is my first foray onto the forums!

We have roughly 150 laptop users on Windows XP SP2 who use Offline Files to access their job folders when they are out of the office. It's a great solution but about once or twice a month we get the nasty "Unable to merge offline changes on \\server_name\share_name. The parameter is incorrect." error which we have to fix .

There appears to be only one source of information on this error, the MSKB. This article (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/230738) claims that the error is caused because...

"The Offline Files cache is a folder structure located in the %SystemRoot%\CSC folder, which is hidden by default. The CSC folder, and any files and subfolders it contains, should not be modified directly; doing so can result in data loss and a complete breakdown of Offline Files functionality."

I do not believe for a second that our users are consistently attempting to access these files directly when they can be found by browsing the network drivers normally. Firstly they don't know this system protected folder exists, secondly I doubt any of them would know how to find it and thirdly what they would do with it when they found it. Especially since it happens on such a regular basis.

Anyway so when this happens we just make a note of what they used to have offline, try our best to recover any unsynced files from the Offline Files Folder, reset the cache by holding CTRL+SHIFT and clicking delete files (as outlined by the KB article), restarting and then making all of their folders offline again. If they complain about losing a nights worth of work we just say "sorry, that's offline files for you", not great but at least it doesn't happen to each user to often. Until now...

Now we have a user who's offline file cache has corrupted four times in two weeks. He is a heavy user of offline files and has about 8Gb of data set to be available offline.

If anyone has any ideas at all about how to avoid the offline cache corrupting in the first place it would be greatly appreciated.

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First things first - make absolutely sure your antivirus product does not touch the CSC folder. I've seen Sophos, McAfee, and Symantec A/V products all cause this problem by scanning files in this folder. I'm sure others can do this, but those are the A/V products I've actually seen do it.

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First things first - make absolutely sure your antivirus product does not touch the CSC folder. I've seen Sophos, McAfee, and Symantec A/V products all cause this problem by scanning files in this folder. I'm sure others can do this, but those are the A/V products I've actually seen do it.

Ah that may well be it, I'll give it a try and let you know what I find. We use McAfee so it does make sense.

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  • 1 month later...
First things first - make absolutely sure your antivirus product does not touch the CSC folder. I've seen Sophos, McAfee, and Symantec A/V products all cause this problem by scanning files in this folder. I'm sure others can do this, but those are the A/V products I've actually seen do it.

Ah that may well be it, I'll give it a try and let you know what I find. We use McAfee so it does make sense.

What was the result, please? We are having similar problems with some of our users. FWIW this has only started over the last 4-6 weeks :-(

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  • 3 weeks later...

I'm having the same exact problem. Started happening the last 2 months or so. I've rest his folder cache numerous times but the issue keeps coming back and can't pinpoint what's causing it. It's REALLY frustrating. If anyone has any suggestions please chime in.

Thanks,

-Mike

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What was the result, please? We are having similar problems with some of our users. FWIW this has only started over the last 4-6 weeks :-(

Well it's early days yet but we haven't had any more go wrong since we put the exception is our AV scanner. I'd give it a go mate!

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What was the result, please? We are having similar problems with some of our users. FWIW this has only started over the last 4-6 weeks :-(

Well it's early days yet but we haven't had any more go wrong since we put the exception is our AV scanner. I'd give it a go mate!

Thanks; I did it a short while back, and haven't heard any more moans. Mind you there are only 2 users in question so the jury's still out.

I found another post indicating that the path length may be a problem

http://groups.google.com/group/microsoft.p...99442c04bdf2a85

but I haven't investigated this yet.

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I'm having the same exact problem. Started happening the last 2 months or so. I've rest his folder cache numerous times but the issue keeps coming back and can't pinpoint what's causing it. It's REALLY frustrating. If anyone has any suggestions please chime in.

Thanks,

-Mike

Have a look at the other branch of this thread.

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  • 1 year later...

Hi all,

I have similar problem with one of our employee's pc. Our corporate antivris is McAfee.

Previous solutions about special rule in McAfee and path lenth did not help.

This problem already appeared on this computer and was resolved only after reimage, but every time in one or two weeks problem appears again. Every time different files does not synchronizing.

What can you suggest?

Thanks in advance

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I have similar problem with one of our employee's pc. Our corporate antivris is McAfee.

Previous solutions about special rule in McAfee and path lenth did not help.

Hey,

Are you getting the "Unable to merge offline changes on \\server_name\share_name. The parameter is incorrect." error or somethnig else?

Cheers,

Dave

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On clean machine synchronizing works fine. But after approx. two weeks past synchronizing stops work for several files. On every machine this files are different.

Probably the problem is in the disk space thant using for temporary offline files? I can not set it more than 2 Gb, maybe you know how can I do it?

Thnx for response

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  • 2 weeks later...

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