So when you use offline files, it stores the offline changes in a binary database in c:\windows, you cannot access it natively. You can view the contents of the binary database, and it seems to follow that if you can view them you can move them.. Attempting to do this gave an error along the lines of the source file or disk could not be read.
The solution? Download Microsoft’s csccmd.exe tool. This is a command line tool that reads the CSC directory (offline files cache database) and allows you to manage it manually.
You can see which network shares are cached with this command:
Csccmd /enum
In my case, I didn’t know what the old share was because the server no longer exists. NOTE: the /enum
option is only available in version 1.1, which you cannot download directly from Microsoft. I found my copy on a third party site linked from a Microsoft discussion page.
Once you have your share name, you can extract any files associated with that share.
Csccmd /extract:\\share\name /target:C:\my_target_dir /recurse
The recurse switch is important for subdirectories, at least in my case it didn’t do anything without it.
There is also a /onlymodified
switch, which will only grab files that were flagged as modified and different from the server copy.