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Guidelines for deploying offline files

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PDFs

There are some important guidelines you need to understand when you deploy offline files on home directory shares that have the showsnapshot share property set on home directories.

If the showsnapshot share property is set on a home directory share that has offline files configured, Windows clients cache all of the Snapshot copies under the ~snapshot folder in the user's home directory.

Windows clients cache all of the Snapshot copies under the home directory if one of more of the following is true:

  • The user makes the home directory available offline from the client.

    The contents of the ~snapshot folder in the home directory is included and made available offline.

  • The user configures folder redirection to redirect a folder such as My Documents to the root of a home directory residing on the CIFS server share.

    Some Windows clients might automatically make the redirected folder available offline. If the folder is redirected to the root of the home directory, the ~snapshot folder is included in the cached offline content.

Note

Offline file deployments where the ~snapshot folder is included in offline files should be avoided. The Snapshot copies in the ~snapshot folder contain all data on the volume at the point at which ONTAP created the Snapshot copy. Therefore, creating an offline copy of the ~snapshot folder consumes significant local storage on the client, consumes network bandwidth during offline files synchronization, and increases the time it takes to synchronize offline files.