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Offline Files - Not Syncing and Encryption Message?


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magusbuckley

magusbuckley

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Hello:

I have two Windows 7 PCs on the wired portion of my home network. On the one PC, I've shared out a folder and on the other, I've mapped a drive to the shared folder and set it to be available offline.

My friend and I were doing some work recently when he asked me why the folders within the share were so unorganized. I keep my digital folders and files very organized so asked him what he was talking about as I moved over to his machine. A quick glance at his monitor revealed that his folders and files were not in sync with my own. I told him we'd move forward with our project and that I would investigate the syncing issue later. But then, another issue arose.

We had purchased some image files, contained within a zip file, from a secured site (https). I unzipped the files and he was trying to access them from his own PC. Everytime he tried to access these files, even just right-clicking on one to see the properties, his PC would momentarily lock up and then explorer would crash. Sometimes, a message would appear stating that he didn't have access to these files. I checked the securities on the folder and images within it and they were just the same as all the other folders and files which he can access with no problem at all. At this point, I forced a sync from his machine and 11 errors occured - all of them were the image files I had unzipped. Ok, so there is an issue with that folder I suppose. I renamed it on my own machine and his mapping demonstrated the folder with the new name but still, he could not access these files. Then, from his machine, and not knowing what else to try at this point, I just assumed the folder was corrupt in some way and deleted it thinking I would recreate it by unzipping the image files from his PC. But when I told Windows to extract the files (just a few totalling well under 10MB) it said it wouldn't be able to unzip the files with encryption and asked if I'd like to proceed to unzip without encryption.

Encryption? What encryption? Neither he nor I have encryption turned on. Or at least I don't think we do. I told it to unzip without encryption and after several minutes, it FINALLY managed to unzip that small amount of data.

It was getting out of hand so I turned off offline files, deleted the offline files, and reset the offline database with a registry hack.

So now he's connected with just a mapped drive meaning, of course, that he can't access the files when my own PC is turned off.

I started researching these issues and found that (if this information is correct) Windows 7 mistakenly believes that zip files from an HTTPS site are encrypted. I think this is strange since I don't see any flags on the folder or files that would signify this. In addition, even if I turn offline files back on, I'm not sure how I can keep his version of these folders and files in sync. I know the sync occurs automatically during startup but I need it to happen on the fly. I found a GPO that can force the PC to sync every minute, but this will only work if the PC detecs a slow network connection and since we're wired on a 1GB line, a "slow connection" isn't likely to happen so that option for me is null and void.

I could put the data on an external HD and plug that into my router and share it from there like a NAS, but then the data would be traveling over the wireless portion of the network and would be considerably slower so I'm hoping it doesn't come to that.

Any ideas on how I can keep offline files in sync? Any ideas why his PC thinks the zip file is encrypted (not as important)?

Thanks,

Magus
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