shove that Briefcase up your...

October 12, 2006 3:25 PM

Briefcase vs. Offline files - please help get the boss out of my hair. Too much

One of the partners at the firm has been having trouble with 'orphan' files in his My Briefcase. Sometimes they're OK, sometimes they show up orphaned. He can commit to calling me and talking about it for ten minutes each day, but can't commit to noting what he's done prior to getting orphans so I might be able to diagnose. I'm not that familiar with My Briefcase, and I have more pressing matters right now than spending the day poking through the MS KB. And he uses the My Briefcase on his work laptop which he takes home every night, so I can't take it away and try to reproduce the problem. Please help!

Here's how he works:
We have two offices, Main and Branch.
He has a docking station at each office and 1 laptop that he carries between them, and also uses to do work at home.
There are half a dozen small MS Office files that he works on often, which reside on a share on the server at Main office at \\servermain\foo\bar\baz\Boss's files.
{So he's not quite using Briefcase as it seems to have been intended, for keeping two machines in sync, or syncing files from removable storage back to a PC. Right?}

So he copies these files from the share and drops them in his Briefcase on his Desktop, and then wanders on his merry way, modifying them at home and on the road, syncing his changes back to the originals on the server share when he docks again at either office.

He started this on his own, and apparently it has been working for him for a while, but now it's not. Sometimes, and lately often, when he docks again a few of the files come up as 'orphan'. From what I can gather from MS, this happens when the originals have been moved, and the Briefcase cannot find them to sync with. But I doubt that the originals are moving, as he started the whole Briefcase thing because he can't be bothered to browse out to \\servermain\foo\bar\baz\Boss etc. So he's not doing it, and I can't see anyone else bothering with them either.

{One note which may help is that I finally got him to show me the Briefcase this morning before he docked, and all of the paths read "\\servermain\" etc.; but when he then docked and the Briefcase sync'ed, the paths all read "F:\bar\baz" etc. = The correct file path in both cases, but using the UNC in one case and the mapped share letter in the other. Is there possibly a problem with Briefcase resolving the two conventions?}

And since he can't ever tell me what he does differently between when it works or when it doesn't, or even if it's the same files that end up orphaned every time, I'm stuck trying to help him blind and hands tied. It's the usual "fix my car, while I'm driving it, and take no time in doing so" request.

Anyway, I've already used up my available time today getting this posting up. But has anyone seen this before?
Any suggestions for an idiotproof desktop "container" for a few files to be modified offline and then synced back to a network share? This morning's googling led me to several "Briefcase vs. Offline files" threads - should I be pursuing that?

Oh, and he has already promised me that he would lose a USB key with his Briefcase on it, and he doesn't want to spend money or time learning new software.

Gah! Metafilter genuises? Anyone?

posted by bartleby to computers & internet (7 comments total)

Just fyi..

I briefcase my entire personal drive at work via UNC path (\\server\username$\documents\) and rarely have sync issues (~50mb, hundreds of office documents)

I have never had an orphan file though,
posted by SirStan at 4:03 PM on October 12, 2006

what exactly is meant by "sync" here anyway? do people change the files while he's gone? does "briefcase" then merge their changes with his? if not, why bother with the whole mess at all? if he's just removing the files to work on at home, and then putting them back, he could just drag them to and from his desktop or a folder.
posted by quonsar at 4:56 PM on October 12, 2006

Something in your post concerns me: If he's getting orphaned files (which I understand from your post to be files where the original has been moved - I've never used Briefcase), he's probably syncing a shared folder that multiple users access. I don't know of any good solution for multiple users to sync files they are all using short of using something like SharePoint where users "check out" documents. Using Offline Files would give you the same problems. On a similar note, I had a group of users demand I set them up to sync a shared folder (against my advice) and they called me the very next day begging me to turn it off (and to restore the dozens of documents they overwrote).

This may not be a possibility for you, but here's what I would do in this situation: set him up with some type of VPN solution so he can access the server from home and hotels. This is assuming he doesn't need to access his docs while riding a train or at lunch with a customer. I use Citrix Access Gateway and it's great because everything is done through a web browser so there's no VPN client configuration to deal with and files are availble from any PC with an Internet connection.

I feel for you bartleby. My boss is in my office every other day with some bizarre idea that needs to move to the top of my list. I personally think my time is better spent working on issues that affect hundreds of users and not just him but what do I know. My desire is for users to bring me problems, not solutions I need to make work.
posted by bda1972 at 5:38 PM on October 12, 2006

In My Briefcase, when File1.jpg is moved from the original sync location (like the desktop) to another (like a folder titled 'Pictures'), the status column for File1.jpg (when viewing it in My Briefcase) will say "Needs Updating" - not "Orphaned."

If you then select File1.jpg and click the "Update Selection" a smaller window will pop up telling you that this file should be deleted from My Briefcase because My Briefcase thinks it has been 'deleted' from the original location, the desktop. My Briefcase does not follow the movement of files as you relocate them. However, if the folder 'Pictures' is synced in My Briefcase, the dialog box will ask you to delete the copy of File1.jpg that was synced from the desktop and create one in the synced copy of 'Pictures.'

"Orphaned" files are created in My Briefcase in one of two ways (that I know of).
1. A new document is created when your boss is working at one location, but instead of saving it to the server he's working on, he saves it to My Briefcase on his laptop. This saved copy is the only copy of this file - there is no file in any other location for it to sync with. It is an orphan.
2. A file that does have a sync copy on one of your servers is "split" in My Briefcase. This is done by selecting the file, then "Briefcase" on the menu bar, and "Split from Original." This will allow you to have two, separate copies of the same file to work on - possibly in two different directions. This function seems to be similar to copying a file to a regular folder.
posted by youngergirl44 at 6:39 PM on October 12, 2006

Ok - after re-reading my post, it seems like a lot without an answer. Here's the short version:

Orphaned files are not created by moving the sync copy that's located outside of My Briefcase. They are created by splitting or creating new files as I posted before.

Because your boss doesn't know why these files are orphans, I doubt he's splitting them from their counterparts intentionally. I would guess he's creating new files in My Briefcase. These new files have no sync copy outside of My Briefcase. Therefore, they are orphans.

He can save files to My Briefcase and then drag-and-drop a sync copy to the appropriate location outside of My Briefcase. Or, he can save files to an outside location and then drag-and-drop a sync copy to My Briefcase.
posted by youngergirl44 at 7:36 PM on October 12, 2006

I'm with quonsar. This kind of issue is exactly why I always turn off Offline Files on all my managed workstations, and turn any briefcase I find lying about into a regular folder. I tell my users that Offline Files and Briefcases are just confusing Microsoft brain farts that will usually come back to bite them somewhere tender, and that we'll all be far better off if they just set a bit of self-policy on where they keep current versions and where they keep backups.

That said: if your boss is accustomed to doing all his work in this briefcase and, like most bosses, won't let a flunky dictate his workflow, I think you should do this:

1. On the laptop, make a desktop shortcut to \\servermain\foo\bar\baz\Boss.

2. Turn on Offline Files on the laptop, then turn off the default synchronization for the user profile folder.

3. Enable offline access for \\servermain\foo\bar\baz\Boss.

4. If your boss is at all pointy-haired, change the shortcut's icon so it looks like a briefcase.

Files created inside the laptop's nameless offline image of \\servermain\foo\bar\baz\Boss should then sync themselves back to \\servermain on connection.

AFAIK, Offline Files doesn't have a concept of orphans; if a file goes missing on either side of a sync'd pair, it will get copied back from the other side.
posted by flabdablet at 10:09 PM on October 12, 2006

BTW quonsar: the only "sync" that any of these things do is to auto-copy files from one side of a synchronized pair of folders to the other side, such that both sides end up with the version having the latest modification time. There is no attempt to merge changes.

In the case of Offline Files, the synchronized pair are the server folder for which you've enabled offline access, and a cache folder on the local workstation whose name is generally not known to the user, who only ever sees the server folder. The effect is to make it seem like you're magically able to use the server folder even when not connected to it.

As bda1972's users found, the Law of Leaky Abstractions applies to this magic: it fails gruesomely when several users have offline access enabled on the same server folder. There is no mechanism at all to deal with the case where two users both modify the same file while offline; latest timestamp just wins.

Briefcases are even worse; they don't synchronize as a whole with any folder in particular. Windows tries to remember the original location of any file put in a Briefcase, and runs the either-way copy logic to make the latest version available both in the Briefcase and in its original home. This is why creating new files inside a Briefcase makes them orphans - they simply don't have any other original home.

The Briefcase abstraction is so leaky that it's really not possible to use it headache-free unless you actually understand what it's doing for (to?) you. I have never actually met an informed Briefcase user in the wild.

I've seen people who always create Briefcases instead of folders, just because they think the icon looks cool. This mostly works as they expect, since all the files are orphans by default, until they start dragging files from one Briefcase to another. Then things get weird.

Personally, I just keep the live version of all my portable data on my thumb drive, and double-click a .cmd file with XCOPY /C /D /E /F /H /I /K /Y /Z in it to back it up to a Thumb Drive Backups folder on every machine I use regularly. Yes, I've been repeatedly informed that this is just weird, old-school behaviour. No, it's never caused me the slighest bit of trouble.
posted by flabdablet at 11:17 PM on October 12, 2006