10-69LESSON 6 CONFIGURING OFFLINE FOLDERS AND FILESLESSON 6

10-69Lesson 6 Configuring Offline Folders and Files

Lesson 6: Configuring Offline Folders and Files

When the network is unavailable, or when you are on the road and your laptop is

undocked, offline folders and files allow you to continue working on files that are

stored on shared folders on the network. These network files are cached on your local

disk so that they are available even if the network is not. When the network becomes

available or when you dock your laptop, your connection to the network is re-estab-

lished. The Offline Files feature synchronizes the cached files and folders on your

local disk with those stored on the network.

After this lesson, you will be able to■

Enable the Offline Files feature on your computer

■

Make folders and files available offline

■

Configure your computer to share folders for use offline

■

Synchronize offline folders and files

Estimated lesson time: 30 minutes

How to Enable the Offline Files Feature On Your Computer

Before you can use offline folders and files, you must configure your computer to use

them. You configure offline folders and files by using the Folder Options selection

located on the Tools menu of My Computer. In the Offline Files tab of Folder Options,

you must select the Enable Offline Files and the Synchronize All Offline Files Before

Logging Off check boxes (see Figure 10-26).

F10us26

Figure 10-26

Use the Offline Files tab in the Folder Options dialog box to enable offline files.

On the Offline Files tab, you can click Delete Files to delete the locally cached copy of

a network file. Click View Files to view the files stored in the Offline Files folder; these

are the locally cached files that you have stored on your system. Click Advanced to

configure how your computer responds when a network connection is lost. For exam-

ple, when a network connection is lost, you can configure your computer to notify you

and allow you to begin working offline.

Note To use Offline Files, you must disable the Fast User Switching feature in Windows. If

your computer is a member of a domain, Fast User Switching is already turned off, anyway. If

your computer is a member of a workgroup, you can disable Fast User Switching by opening

the User Accounts tool in Control Panel and clicking Change The Way Users Log On Or Off. For

more details on Fast User Switching, see Chapter 7, “Setting up and Managing User

Accounts.”

How to Make Folders and Files Available Offline

To make a specific file or folder available offline and enable automatic synchronization

with the network, follow these steps: