Sync center issue in Windows 7: sync conflict zeroing out remote file

Question

Hi,
I'm using Windows 7 RTM Prof Eng x64 on my laptop, and I'm making available offline a folder on a remote share with Offline files. The remote share is hosted on a Windows Server 2003 R2 Ent Eng x86 server. The server is a domain controller, but the laptop is not joined to the domain. The remote folder is like 320 MB, mainly images, doc, pdf and xls files.
Synching is usually working, but sometimes I observe the following: I modify a file on my machine, and later Sync center reports a sync conflict, although nobody else modified the remote file. When I check the remote file, it is full with NULLS, e.g. if it is a doc file, it opens as a lot of empty pages.
I used the same setup with Windows Vista without problems, it just started to occur when I switched to Win 7.
I could not reproduce the issue, but the problem could be related to the network setting:
- it is something like: laptop ---|public network|--- server ---|private network|
- I usually access the server from the laptop on a public network with just its netbios name, i.e. \\server. But from this network it is also accessible from \\server.domain.com and \\server-public-ip The small sync icon appears near the folder name only when I view it as \\server, and not in the other two cases.
- when I connect to with WLAN, then the laptop is connected to the private network. Here the server is accessible via \\server-private-ip or \\server.domain2.local. When I open \\server only the offline folder is visible (the server is also a firewall, which blocks SMB going out to the public network).
- the clocks of the two machines are not synchronized, but the difference is below 10 seconds
I could understand a sync conflict or not detecting that the local and remote file are the same, but the zeroing out the remote file part is quite mysterious. Have anyone seen something like that?
Thanks for the help,
Zoltan

Answer 1

Hi,
Did you find a solution to this issue? We are experiencing the same.
We have had users reporting that they have created a word doc whilst on the network. Saved it, then logged off and taken their laptops home. Worked on the file for a few hours, with several saves, closes and reedits. Then finally saved the file, logged off.
When returning to work and logging in whilst connected to the network the file then becomes 0KB. The file appears to be unrecoverable as backups are only of the server version. There is no previous versions recorded and the last edited is the data of the
original blank file. It would appear that the server version (Older) is overwriting the Local cached version (Newer).
This is obviously causing some serious issues for staff who have lost hours of work done at home. Has anyone else experienced this.
Servers run Windows 2008 R2, Clients Windows 7 Professional. Offline Files setup by Group Policy.
Regards,
Fraser