>Recently ran into situation where our application was exhibiting strange behavior -- as if the workstations were seeing different copies of the files. The confusing bit is that all the workstations involved appeared to be referencing the same network share. We check the server and we saw different file sizes and timestamps on several files than what was reported on a few workstations. Finally tracked it down to offline files feature being enabled on the network shares. Eventually figured out I had to go to the sync center and deal with the conflicts there (basically select if the copy on the network share is the one we want to keep or update the network share with the locally cached copy). At some point we released the drive mapping and re-established it -- but as a result, ran into yet another issue where half the files were being reported as zero bytes in length and with mangled timestamp -- I'm guessing some of this might be a problem with the network connection, and so the caching mechanism got munged data that is now being reflected in Explorer. Didn't have a chance to drop to the command line to see what might be reported (I'm apt to believe that command prompt will likely show the raw information that reflects what's actually on the share rather than what Explorer shows with its "cooked" interpretation that includes the redirected file info).
>Afterwards, I stumbled across some info here:
>http://blog.wisefaq.com/2016/01/26/nocscno-client-side-caching/
>with regards to adding the $NOCSC$ suffix that could be added to the hostname when accessing a share and bypassing the local cache. I didn't get a chance to see if this might've helped in the situation I'd run into.

Very interesting.

TBH I've never seen a use case for offline files. That said, this is good to know for troubleshooting.