edition

Vista Home and Vista Home Premium does not support offline files feature. See the table below to know which editions support offline files.

Windows 2000	Supports Offline files
XP Home	Does not support Offline files
XP Professional	Supports Offline files
Vista Home	Does not support Offline files
Vista Home Premium	Does not support Offline files
Vista Business	Supports Offline files
Vista Ultimate	Supports Offline files

vista offline files not available

On Vista Offline files feature is available only in the following editions.

• Vista Business
• Vista Ultimate

This feature is not supported by Vista  Home and Vista Home Premium editions.

Offline files missing in network and internet

If you do not see Offline files option in Network and Internet in Control Panel, then it could be that you are running an edition of OS which does not support Offline Files feature. Offline files feature is provided only in Vista Business and Vista Ultimate editions. It is not supported by Vista Home and Vista Home premium editions. Also Windows Server 2008 does not have offline files feature by default. We need to install Desktop Experience on Server 2008 machines to use offline files feature.

Make a share available offline

After enabling Offline files feature as said in this article , we can start marking network shares for offline availability. Right click the network share/folder/file you want to be available offline, you can see the option 'Always available offline' in the context menu. Click on it and offline files marks the selected file/folder for offline availability and copies them to the local CSC folder.

Make network share available offline in Windows Vista

Offline files feature allows to access network shares even in offline mode i.e even if the machine is not connected to the network. To use this feature first thing we need to do is enabling offline files feature. This can be done as explained in the post How to enable offline files in Vista.

Once offline files is enabled, we need to mark the share for offline availability. This can be done as explained below.

1. Open the network share and right click on the share.
2. Click on "Always Available Offline"

Now the whole share will copied to the local offline files folder. Once the share is copied to the local machine, then onwards the share will be available for offline access. We can even edit the files in offline mode. When we connect the machine back to the network all the changes saved locally will be automatically replicated on the server copies too.

The above applies to Windows Vista. The steps are same for Windows XP too, but the option name to be selected in the step 2 above is "Make available offline". It is renamed as "Always available offline" in Windows Vista.

Offline Files folder location in Vista

Offline files are stored in the folder [systemdrive]:\windows\csc. If the system drive is C: then offline files cache will be in the folder c:\windows\csc. This is system default location and can be changed by editing the registry key Cachelocation.

How to view offline files in Vista

On Windows Vista you can view offline cached files as per the following steps.

• Click on Start button(Shortcut for this: Ctrl-Esc)
• Select Control Panel from the start menu
  
  
• Click on Network and Internet 
• Click on Offline Files.
• Click on 'View Offline Files'.

Note: This article applies only to Windows Vista. On windows XP the mechanism to view offline files is different from the above.