Reclaiming Your Hard-drive From Offline Files

I doubt many of you use the Windows Offline Files feature, so this is unlikely to be of any interest. I’ll probably need the info again in the future though, so I’m recording it here.

To make it easier to access all my data from the assortment of machines scattered round the house I store as much as possible on the central server, including my “My Documents” folder. So that I still have access to the important stuff when my laptop isn’t in the house I use the “Offline files” feature in Windows. It pretty much works.

Recently though, my laptop has been repeatedly complaining that it was running low on disk space - each time it did, I’d scavenge half a gig or so. I didn’t think I’d been adding new things at the rate it was filling up, so yesterday I spent a bit more time investigating what was consuming all the space.

I discovered that around 13GB of my 30GB hard-drive was taken up by the Windows\CSC folder. Some investigation showed that that’s where Windows caches the offline files. That’s a little bit more than the “use 10% of my hard-drive” setting says the offline files will use!

Deleting all the offline files didn’t help matters. Nor did turning the offline files feature off. In the end I had to follow these instructions to reinitialize the offline files cache and then set-up my offline files again.

Lo and behold, I now have over eleven gig free on my laptop hard-drive again.