Once upon a time in an IT shop far, far away I thought that Windows offline files was a fantastic feature. Who remembers when it used to be called the briefcase? Now with DFS, SharePoint, Folder Redirection, and other modern file services taking over from standard file shares, the technology is dated and often causes conflicts.
Recently I was tasked with disabling all offline files for a large organization. If I didn’t care how much pain I caused the end users or the helpdesk, I could have just flipped a few settings in a GPO and moved on. I knew that just turning them off would cause trouble because the offline database is easily corrupted. When this happens the clients end up with files on them that have not synchronized with the sever.
I needed a way to identify which workstations had been configured to use offline files. I opened my browser and ran some searches. I came up empty. I’d have to come up with my own solution. I guessed that WMI would have the info I needed and I was right; win32_OfflineFilesCache would give me the status. A little PowerShell magic let me find every workstation on the domain, check for offline files, and output everything to a CSV report.
Import-Module ActiveDirectory
Function OfflineFilesStatus {
$Computers = Get-ADComputer -Filter 'Operatingsystem -Notlike "*server*" -and enabled -eq "true"' -Properties dnshostname|Select dnshostname -ExpandProperty dnshostname
Foreach ($Computer in $Computers)
{Get-WMIObject win32_OfflineFilesCache -ComputerName $Computer|
Select @{n="Computer";e={$Computer}}, @{n="Enabled";e={$_.Enabled}}, @{n="Active";e={$_.Active}}
}
}
$report = OfflineFilesStatus|Sort-Object Computer
$report|Export-CSV C:\Temp\OfflineFilesStatusReport.csv -NoTypeInformation
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