Embarrassed to recommend Microsoft software

By apexwm, 18 November, 2010 03:22

A few times in the past I've been caught recommending Microsoft products, only to have it come back and bite me when things don't work properly. Recently I had this experience once again, when I recommended the use of offline files in Windows 7. For some reason, offline files has never been extremely stable in Windows. Simply doing a Google search about offline files and problems in Windows XP will bring up more than enough reading material. Supposedly, offline files has been reworked in Windows 7 and the stability issues ironed out. But this doesn't seem to be the case in reality. I discovered the hard way, that offline files in Windows 7 is as quirky as ever. In my situation, I helped set up offline files to synchronize a network drive in Windows 7. The main purpose of synchronizing was the storage of a PST (personal storage) file for use in Outlook when the network drive was not connected. In Windows XP, synchronizing a PST file was not supported. In Windows 7, it is supported, but in my case it only worked for 2 days (just fine), then it broke on the third day without warning. Eventually, Windows reported that the PST file's offline status was "unavailable" in Sync Center, and the file could not be opened by Outlook when running in offline mode (when Windows uses the offline cached copy of the file). When the network drive is back online, it works fine.

While troubleshooting this issue, we soon discovered the other various quirks with offline files in Windows 7. One idea was the delete all of the local cached offline files, and let it resynchronize again from scratch. We soon found that deleting the cached offline files is quite a challenge. Repeatedly clicking on the "Delete offline files" button in Sync Center would finish successfully, however it still reported 2 GB of disk space being used. Each time the "Delete offline files" button was pressed, the amount of used disk space would decrease, until eventually only 300 KB was left. Doing some research on Google turned up this as a known quirk as well. One solution is to "rebuild" the offline files cache database with a registry setting, to get the usage back to 0 KB. The registry entry is supposed to force the database to rebuild.

In summary, I'm not impressed at all with offline files. Especially when I compare it to solutions like rsync in Linux, which works perfectly every time, and works very very well. Why can't Microsoft learn from previous mistakes, and fix their software? It's embarrasing to recommend these products and sell the idea of using Microsoft software to somebody, when it will work for a while then break all of a sudden out of the blue. I should have learned, that it's OK to recommend Microsoft software if absolutely necessary, but I no longer guarantee that it will work as designed.

Talkback

Offline files is seriously flaky and, though better, remains so in Win7 under which it Just Works (TM) most but (infuriatingly) not all the time.
manek 18 November, 2010 10:08
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This post has been removed by a moderator.

manek : Thanks for the comment. I had high hopes with offline files when it was announced that it was completely reworked in Windows 7. The interface is definitely improved with Sync Center. But, it might be time to look for a 3rd party product. I've never found a good sync software package in Windows. I've tried Syncback and SyncToy (Microsoft) and had issues with those as well in tests. I've also tried to get rsync to run in Windows (since it's a very solid solution in the Linux world), but this was also a challenge and it couldn't get around issues with files in use (no support for volume shadow copy). But it might be time to revisit them and see if they have improved.
apexwm 18 November, 2010 12:51
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"The main purpose of synchronizing was the storage of a PST (personal storage) file for use in Outlook when the network drive was not connected."

To imitate MS's latest phone ads...... Really?

Microsoft has NEVER supported PST files on a LAN or WAN link. ( http://support.microsoft.com/kb/297019 ) Move the PST files to the local drive and then use something like SyncToy to copy them up to the network drive for backup purposes.
benched42 18 November, 2010 17:13
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benched42 : I am aware of the statement from Microsoft about not supporting PST files over a network drive. However in this case, it has been company standard to put them on a network drive so that they are all backed up on the file server, and has been in place for many years for hundreds of users. Putting the file on the local C drive and synchronizing it to the file server can get messy. For instance, what happens when the sync breaks, but the admin never knows, and the C drive blows up. I've tried solutions like you mention and it's a maintenance nightmare when you are talking about a large number of PCs. Having it on a network drive works, even though it is not supported. And we can always guarantee that the file on the network drive is the file they are actively using, and is actively being backed up at all times. In this case, synchronizing also worked fine until it broke.
apexwm 18 November, 2010 17:40
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Have you ever looked at unison? Cross platform tool, can be run from the command line for scripting, decent GUI. It might be worth a look.

http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/
sgtrock 18 November, 2010 19:49
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I feel the same about Microsoft. After 25 years, I expect some things to simply work but of course they don't. The whole registry business is just nasty.

Personally, I use PureSync (free for personal use). It does what Redmond cannot. In fact, I use it with all of my media drives (1.5 TB) for syncing to their backups in native NTFS filesystems.
It works well.
fid 20 November, 2010 00:13
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sgtrock / fid : Thanks for the feedback. I will put those two programs on the list of possible ones to check out.

It's a shame that even with Microsoft's latest operating system, you still need to consult in 3rd parties to write software to gain functionality. There are also other alternatives, so it will take some time to thoroughly test each one.
apexwm 29 November, 2010 13:34
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