I recently setup a Windows Vista Ultimate Media Center to hold the family CD collection and allow navigation of same through the TV set in the family room. It is finally getting there in usability as my wife can now use it, etc.
As part of this it was time to take each of our individual music libraries and use the excellent Media Monkey to de-duplicate songs, etc and come up with a single library. I did all of that and the next step was to figure out how to throw a copy on my laptop for use on the road.
First thought, Offline Files! Without checking how big the folder was I marked the whole thing as always available offline on my Vista Ultimate laptop.
25GB later I got a message that the sync failed because the cache size was too small. Bummer the folder was 47GB! I decided this wasn’t the right approach so I tried to disable the folder for offline availability. Once done I still had 25GB on my disk taken up by the offline files. I realized turning off offline files on the share didn’t turn it off on all the folders further down in the hierarchy.
I disabled Offline files. Still 25GB of my disk gone.
I ran a great utility SpaceMonger.exe to try and find it. Didn’t even show up.
Come to find out offline files are stored in %SYSTEMROOT%\CSC. However even as the administrator you don’t have access to that folder. Even with UAC turned off! To see what is in it you have to take ownership of that folder and all subfolders.
To clear it you need to disable offline files and then delete those folders.
Finally got my 25GB back. Now looking for a different way to sync parts of my music library to my laptop.