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I have a user who has had a shortcut to his documents stop working. Further investigation has revealed that the shortcut (which worked up until yesterday) points to:
\\server\redirectedfolders\user\my documents\ Which now contains just one folder, Outlook Files, itself containing one file - a .pst email archive
He now needs to browse to:
\\server\redirectedfolders\user\documents\ which contains what he was expecting to see at the above location.
This combined with a 20 minute logon this morning leads me to believe that windows has reinitialised his offline files moving everything to a new location.
I have never come across this before and can't see anything out of the ordinary in the event log. What could have caused Windows to do this?
Miles Hayler
Posted 2013-04-02T15:26:54.817
Reputation: 209
are you in a group=policy controlled domain? if so, try removing the pc from the domain, and re-add it. – Frank Thomas – 2013-04-02T15:58:08.487
I have the problem solved, but I would like to know what caused it. Group policy hasn't been changed in months. – Miles Hayler – 2013-04-02T16:03:55.410
indeed. keep in mind, GP is applied to a workstation on an intermittent basis, so during application, it is possible to muck things up. additionally this information is stored locally so its susceptible to storage corruption. we haven't changed our GP in years, but every once in a while our redirected mydocs will disappear, and the best bet is usually to unjoin and rejoin the domain so that the GP info is purged, and then pulled down again enmasse. you might try 'gpupdate /FORCE' but that command often doesn't affect policy that has already been applied, and just looks for Delta. – Frank Thomas – 2013-04-02T16:32:19.970
1Oh, also another thing to look at: MS Synch Center does messed up things to offline files, that can affect folder redirection if the share is set to work offline. in that case, disabling synch in the control panel may restore function. – Frank Thomas – 2013-04-02T16:35:31.093