Solved Cannot set files to "Always Available Offline"

The system in question here is not listed in my systems but is a Surface Pro 9 running Win 11 23H2 Build 22631.2861 Home version

I'm setting this system up for my wife and we have some mapped drives that I need to make available offline. I have done this before on a number of Win 10 and 11 systems and it's always been quite easy.

On this system, however, the right click menu does not contain the "Always available offline" toggle. Doing some research I found that I might need to go to Sync Center, select "Manage offline files" and set to enable. Problem is that this doesn't open the window allowing enable to be checked. Doing a little more research found that I might need to add a Start 32b word in the CSC and CSCServices areas of the registry (HKLM/System/CurrentControlSet/Services). OK, but they didn't exist at all so I exported them from another Win 11 system and imported them into the registry. The source system does have mapped files set to Always available offline, btw.

Well, hat didn't help either as Sync Center still does not open the Enable setting window and right clicking the mapped drive doesn't display the Always toggle. I'm now officially out of my depth on this one and would very much appreciate suggestions.

(I would have attached some screen grabs illustrating the above but found the forum system above my pay grade as well.)

I've not seen Mapped drives being available in a computer that is Offline. Offline means being disconnected to other sources, I have a 4TB NAS drive [2 x 4TB as RAID 1] connected to my Router by Ethernet cable and can access it from any computer Wired or Wireless with access to the Router and Map the Public folder on it, get full read/write access to the files in that folder.

@Berton - The feature is one that I've used for a long time. In our case I create a map to a directory on our NAS. Right clicking on the Mapped drive in File Explorer opens the drop menu in which there is an option "Always available offline". If this is toggled the system then makes a local copy of the mapped drive which is then available if you are offline. When you are online files are sourced from the network location. The advantage here is that the local and network copies are kept in sync across all the systems set up this way. On this particular machine something is screwed up so I can't turn this on.

I don't have that choice for Offline for my NAS drive.
Right-click of my Z: drive:




Not on a folder either:

@Berton That's the exact problem I'm running into, the option isn't showing up. I have both Win 10 and Win 11 (Pro) systems where this option is available and works fine. The only thing different here is this system is a Home version but I have no idea if that's what the problem is.

dlross said:

@Berton That's the exact problem I'm running into, the option isn't showing up. I have both Win 10 and Win 11 (Pro) systems where this option is available and works fine. The only thing different here is this system is a Home version but I have no idea if that's what the problem is.

Click to expand...

That is your problem, the choice is available on the Pro version, not on Home. May need to buy a Pro license. Don't know about Education edition but probably is available on the Enterprise edition mostly used by companies. Apparently there's users not understanding that there are differences between Home and Pro judging by what I've been seeing on MSN News widgets.

Aha, thanks, I guess the system's going to cost me another $100. Oh well, at least I'll have gpedit then. Thanks again.

When I changed from Home to Pro on both Win10 and Win11 I only needed the key, most files were already in the install so it didn't take long to make the change.