Restoring files/folders of a network drive?

[ivwshane]

I have a network drive that multiple computers map to. Just in case the drive fails I have another computer set to enable offline files of the network drive.

Now if the network drive fails and I have to reinstall windows and recreate the network drive, will windows automatically syncronize or restore the network drives data using the other computers offline files?



For the life of me I can't figure out a good search string to use to look this up.

 

[Brazen]

Originally posted by: ivwshane
I have a network drive that multiple computers map to. Just in case the drive fails I have another computer set to enable offline files of the network drive.

Now if the network drive fails and I have to reinstall windows and recreate the network drive, will windows automatically syncronize or restore the network drives data using the other computers offline files?



For the life of me I can't figure out a good search string to use to look this up.

I think Briefcase would be a better idea, and do a sync once a day. Offline Files is flaky in my experience. It never seems to sync how, when or what I want it to or expect it to. You have more control with a briefcase and it's more reliable, but you will have to manually tell it to update.

 

[ivwshane]

I can already sync. I just want to know what happens with the remote directory if it goes bad (ie disk failure) and I have to recreate it, will windows take the data from the client pc?

 

[Brazen]

Originally posted by: ivwshane
I can already sync. I just want to know what happens with the remote directory if it goes bad (ie disk failure) and I have to recreate it, will windows take the data from the client pc?

It depends. After you recreate it, would you have restored a backup? The restore should preserver the old timestamps which would show the files to be older and therefore overwritten by any newer file revisions on your laptop. But it's Windows so who knows what it will actually do...

 

[ivwshane]

What do you mean, "restore the backup"? The only backup would be the offline files.

 

[nweaver]

Originally posted by: ivwshane
What do you mean, "restore the backup"? The only backup would be the offline files.

offline files is not a backup 🙂

if you are saying "Is this a side perk to offline files", it is different then saying "Can I use offline files as a backup"

which are you asking?

 

[ivwshane]

"Can I use offline files as a backup"

I'll put it another way.

Lets say I have a share on my laptop where I do my work (original copies are on it) and I have my desktop set to use the share via offline files. What happens if my laptop gets stolen? I can still access the files on the desktop but can I recreate that share on a new laptop and have those offline files sync up with the new share (which would have the old share name and the laptop would have the same computer name)?

 

[Brazen]

Originally posted by: ivwshane
"Can I use offline files as a backup"

I'll put it another way.

Lets say I have a share on my laptop where I do my work (original copies are on it) and I have my desktop set to use the share via offline files. What happens if my laptop gets stolen? I can still access the files on the desktop but can I recreate that share on a new laptop and have those offline files sync up with the new share (which would have the old share name and the laptop would have the same computer name)?

Only if you feel very very lucky...

I believe when offline files sees that they files have been removed from the network share, then they will automatically be removed from the offline file cache. Again, briefcase would work better for this. But for backups, a more dedicated solution would be even better, such as ntbackup, and can be scheduled.

 

[ivwshane]

See that's what I was affraid of, when the original share comes back online, offline files will think that they have been deleted and delete the offline files.

The other issue I see is that when a share has been deleted and a computer was syncing with it for use with offline files you can't remove it from the sync process (you can uncheck it so it doesn't try to sync but you can't actually remove the invalid offline files), at least I haven't found a way.


That would be a nice function to add to offline files though, a way to restore the original files from chache.

 

[BigJimbo]

jsut create a batch file that will auto-backup files to your network share. Therefore, the data is local as well as on your network drive.

heres one script i give my laptop users to run before they leave for the day...

xcopy "C:\Documents and Settings\%username%\My Documents" /M /s /y "i:\%username%\_Backup\My Documents\"

This sends the directory My Documents to their home drive (or network drive).

 

[ivwshane]

Unfortunately I would need a way to do it without user intervention because they are not there every day and multiple people use these computers.

But maybe I could use windows schedular to do this?

Basically I guess I'm looking for a way to have two network drives mirror one another...

 

[ivwshane]

Without going in a new direction (which would be the smart thing to do😛) I have figured how to get the offline files back onto a recreated share.

If the network share goes down and needs to be recreated, it will sync with computers that are set to use offline files pointing to the network share. The problem is that when it syncs it will delete any unmodified files. However if I do not sync the files I can copy the offline files to a temp directory, sync the offline folder (essentially deleting everything) and then copy the contents from the temp directory to the recreated share and resync😀

It's not an automatic solution but since I would have to physically be their to fix the computer with the share on it I can do the above while I'm there.

 

[Brazen]

I would suggest trying something closer to BigJimbo's idea, but use Robocopy instead of xcopy. Robocopy is from Microsoft just like xcopy, it's a part of the Windows XP resource kit - freely downloadable. With Robocopy you can specify the /MIR directive which will only copy changed files and also delete files from the destination that have been deleted from the source, so it stays a true mirror copy. Then you can schedule this in a batch file and Task Scheduler. I would suggest mirroring to another el cheapo file server too, rather than someone's desktop computer.

Frankly, your idea of using Offline Files at all for a "backup" solution sounds like you are looking to get burned.

One other neat thing about Robocopy - it has an option to keep running and copy files as soon as they are changed. Also, I _think_ you can set it to keep running for a set time period. So if you wanted to have files synced constantly, you could create a task scheduler that tells Robocopy to run and sync for 24 hours, and then run that task every 24 hours. That way if for some reason the process dies or the server is rebooted, task scheduler will restart it the next time it is scheduled. Or you could have it run indefinately and I think you can tell task scheduler to only run a task if the previous instance of the task has finished (either way is so you don't get tens or hundreds or Robocopy tasks all running at the same time, doing the same thing - that could be bad).

 

[ivwshane]

Thanks I'll look into that.
Unfortunately more hardware is not an option. This particular office has five computers and the type of files they create, while important, can be easily recreated.

 

[RebateMonger]

We've used ViceVersa Pro for the past two years to synchronize a large number of files (14,000) on two different computers. We use it across the Internet (using a VPN), but it'll certainly work fine on a local network.

We tried both Offline Files and Briefcase, but neither works well with large numbers of files across a slow connection.

One feature of ViceVersa Pro is that it keeps a "History File Database" of all changes on both the server and the client. What this means is that, if, for some reason, one of the synchronizing computers crashes, it will complain about the lack of the synchronization database and will refuse to delete files on the surviving computer. You can also tell it to keep a BACKUP copy of any files deleted or changed on either the server or the client.

Yes, Windows Offline Files can be dangerous if you don't understand how it works. As you've noted, when you lose an Offline Files server, you need to COPY the cached files on the client immediately. The first time you try to re-synch an Offline Files cache to a new (empty) share, Offline Files will think that all the files have been deleted and will delete them from your cache too.

As always, there's NOTHING as good as a genuine, offline backup. Automatic file synchronization can be nice, but it CAN fail and you can end up with both the original and the copy being deleted. Not to mention that synchronzed files do nothing to prevent accidental deletion/overwrite and virus and worm attacks.