How to Recover Offline files in Windows XP

Back in the day I debated the short-comings of off-line files with many a MSFTer, with the response from more than one Microsoft employee being a hushed “don’t tell anyone I said this, but off-line files is not a reliable feature”. You only have to look around at the number of blogs and web-sites dedicated solely to resolving end-users off-lines file woes to realise things aren’t right. Of course, Vista has come along now so everything is ok – but what about all those people still using XP – or to put it another way, what about 90% of Windows users out there?

I can’t recall the amount of times when I’ve had a ‘phone call from a user who had spent hours working on a document on his laptop, then found that document mysteriously disappeared when he synchronised his files on-line.

Clients Missing Files

One such situation occurred today when a client ‘phoned me to ask where two of his files had gone to – they were there one minute, but as soon as the computer had finished synchronising with the company server – they weren’t to be found.

The files had gone, sure enough, and although we could restore the last best copy from either on-site or off-site backup, the work the user did on the files since he last synchronised seemed lost.

Downloading CSCCMD

Step in CSCCMD – supposedly part of the Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit. I say supposedly, because although version 1.0 of CSCCMD is indeed within the ResKit download – it doesn’t contain an important feature – the /EXTRACT function. This can only be found in CSCCMD 1.1 – which is apparently harder to find than Rocking Horse droppings! I finally located a copy via this blog – kudos to the writer for making the file available himself. I’ve made sure you can now also download the file csccmd_v1.1.zip here – if anyone knows an “official” source of this file, do leave a comment below and let me know.

Using CSCCMD

What do CSCCMD do? It allows you to work with the off-line file cache – located (a hidden folder) at C:WindowsCSC. If you browse to that directory directly, you’ll see a list of numbered folders and suitably mysteriously named files within. CSCCMD allows you to extract those files into a readable format using the EXTRACT function we spoke of earlier. In this case I dropped a copy of CSCCMD.EXE into C:WindowsCSC and then executed the command

CSCCMD /EXTRACT:\servernameshare /TARGET:c:temp /recurse

… where <servernameshare> is the off-line folder location you’re trying to recover, /TARGET:c:temp is a temporary folder setup as a suspense location for the extracted files, and /recurse is a switch that makes sure that CSCCMD extracts all files in all folders found within C:WindowsCSC.

Minutes later, CSCCMD had ran its magic.

My advice to the user going forwards? If you’re working on a very important document or making lots of changes, save a copy to a USB key-disk before returning to the office – I didn’t specifically say off-line files under XP wasn’t to be trusted, but he got the idea.

Now cue a ton of e-mails and comments telling me off-line files is infinitely better within Windows Vista and the user is a fool for sticking with XP… 🙂