Change disk used for offline files in Windows 7

Question

I'm moving some photos to a folder on a shared NAS drive in our home, which I've marked as "Always available offline" in Windows 7 so that I can add it to the Photos library. Windows wants to store the offline copies of the files on my smaller boot disk, instead of my larger data disk. Is there any way to change this?

Answer 1

To change the location of the offline files cache (by default it's in %windir%\CSC)

1. Disable Offline files

2. Open regedit, navigate to

   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\CSC\Parameters

   create a new string value called CacheLocation and set it to the desired path, for example:

   \??\e:\csc

   Note: you have to use the Windows NT format for the path (backslash, double question marks, backslash)

3. Reboot, then re-enable Offline files (which in turn will require a second reboot)

If you want to keep the cache contents the process is a bit more complicated:

How to move the client-side caching (CSC) folder to a new location

As a final note, if you somehow manage to mess up the CSC cache (which isn't very difficult, I did that several times...), and Offline files start behaving strangely, you can reset it to a clean, empty state:

Create a new DWORD value FormatDatabase = 1 in the above mentioned registry key and reboot.