offline file not available?

Question

I have some old notes for old games downloaded and stored on my old Windows 98SE/XP computer. I made them available as a network share when I got a second Windows computer, and I enabled offline files on my Windows 10 desktop for that share practically as soon as I got the computer out of the box.

Yet for some reason tonight I couldn't access one of the files on it until I turned the XP computer on even though I had offline files enabled.

Notice the "always available offline" was checked? I can see the subfolders in the directory listed, but trying to access any files or sub-directories produces an error:

"Windows cannot access \slickswintel\faqs\bg2

You do not have permission to access \slickswintel\faqs\bg2. Contact your network administrator to request access

For more information about permissions, see Windows Help and Support"

Which suggests I don't have access rights to the files in the share permissions, but that error went away about a minute after booting the old computer into Windows XP and the Win10 computer recognized it was back online.

For obvious reasons I don't turn the Windows XP computer on very often these days, and the whole point of turning on offline files was so I could access those old files if I needed them without having to scoot over and turn on the old computer. It used to work that way for years. Was something broken in the last Win10 update or could something else be screwed up? I'm not even sure how to go about trying to fix it so offline files works correctly again since it looks like it was configured correctly.

Answer 1

Hello Slick RCBD, welcome to Microsoft Q&A forum.

This behavior usually indicates Offline Files (CSC) cache corruption (can happen overtime). You can try to fix this by re‑initializing the Offline Files cache.

Note: any unsynced offline changes will be lost. Make sure the XP machine is online and everything is fully synced first.

Steps (on the Windows 10 PC):

• Bring the XP computer online > from Windows 10 open the share > Control Panel > Sync Center > run a manual sync and confirm there are no conflicts.
• Control Panel > Sync Center > Manage offline files > Disable > restart the PC.
• Reinitialize the CSC cache:
  • Open regedit as administrator.
  • Go to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Csc\Parameters (create Parameters if it doesn’t exist).
  • Create DWORD (32‑bit) FormatDatabase and set it to 1.
  • Restart the PC.
• Control Panel > Sync Center > Manage offline files > Enable > restart again.
• Browse to the XP share > right‑click the folder > Always available offline > allow it to fully re‑sync.

This forces Windows to rebuild the Offline Files database and usually restores offline access.

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