How to restore Offline Files for Windows Os
We had a customer with many files in his My Documents which was set to synchronize with his W2k3 server using Offline Files. Well, his Windows install crashed and we couldn’t get the Windows Domain Server that was dismissed.
He had not synchronized with the server for several months. For many of the files, the only copy was on his hard drive. But with offline files, it does not store them in their naitive format, it is some compressed format in the %SYSTEMROOT%\CSC directory.
After many reasearches we find using CSCCMD command to forcably remove local copies of offline files to network shares that no longer exist. We thought, maybe the same program can extract these files too… and it CAN!
csccmd.exe v1.1 download
You need to download version 1.1 of CSCCMD.EXE!
- Official MS Location requires contacting MPSS: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/884739
- Alternate location: http://www.jacksontechnical.com/pubfiles/csccmd_v1.1.zip
Use a working computer with the same version and service pack level of Windows XP.
Copy the %SYSTEMROOT%\CSC directory contents from the old hard drive to the same location on the working computer.
On the working machine, open a command prompt.
Type csccmd /enable
Create a target directory, for example C:\Restore
Type csccmd /extract /target:C:\Restore /recurse
Your files will be extracted from their compresses offline files format back to their original format!
