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I have a main Windows 8.1 machine, BEAST, which has two two directories, D:\MAINDISK and D:\INSTALLDISK which are shared so that my other machines may read them - MAINDISK has my work and digital "home", INSTALLDISK has .iso's of installation media.

I have repurposed and refreshed a Windows 7 machine (named MYCENAE) to act as a fileserver, specifically as a backup repository - to this end I reinstalled its OS, and added 12 TB of disk. It runs DOS scripts that use ROBOCOPY to bring across any changes to MAINDISK or INSTALLDISK.

I noticed today that the backup files are out of date. When I sit down at MYCENAE and look at //BEAST/MAINDISK, it looks "stale", without newer files. I spent many hours researching this, turning off offline files, etc.

I just shared //BEAST/D, the drive with MAINDISK and INSTALLDISK. The crazy thing is if I look at //BEAST/D/MAINDISK, it's fine, and updates as it should, while //BEAST/MAINDISK does not. They refer to the same physical place, I'm looking at them from the same machine (MYCENAE) using the same network settings, but getting different results.

Does anyone have any idea how this is possible?

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This sounds like you have 'offline files' enabled on the Windows 7 and 8.1 computers.

The first task I'd recommend is to go to Control Panel and click 'Offline Files', disable the offline files. You'll need to restart the computer. Once you do that the workstations will no longer cache the files locally if the server (BEAST) is offline.

Instructions on my website: https://www.alcomcomputing.co.uk/disable-offline-files-windows-7/

A final check you may want to do is to disable caching of shares. Do this on BEAST. This should prevent clients from making the shares offline but I've found it to be a little unreliable so I always manually turn off offline files on the workstations.

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    Please disclose any affiliation you have to the site you linked.
    – user409814
    Apr 9, 2017 at 18:41

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