Resetting Vista Offline Files

A little while back i posted about resetting the offline file cache in XP.

I had a comment left by Rick asking how to do this in Vista

After a little digging the initial answer is…..you can’t

Well not quite (just not as easily)…things like csccmd.exe don’t apply anymore as the offline files functionality has been overhauled in Vista.

Maniuplation of offline files can be done via WMI so expect to see lots of vbscripts pop up

A good place to start is the “Filing Cabinet” blog where there are a couple of WMI example scripts (here and here)

So anyway…reseting the cache….one of those Filing Cabinet posts talks about moving the cache location and mentions a FormatDatabase registry key

So after a bit of searching i found a kb article that suggests the following (do this at your own risk!)

“add the FormatDatabase registry entry to the following registry subkey:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Csc\Parameters

Then, set the FormatDatabase registry entry to 1.

The restart your computer”

It doesn’t mention if you need to reset the key back to 0 when your done

Will it reset the database after every reboot? or does the reset process change the entry for you? Need to check that out

The article wasn’t easy to find as it’s not specifically about resetting offline files but does talk about a corrupt offline cache

P.S Some other good Vista offline cache resources include:

Jonathan Hardwick and The Windows Vista blog