While you’re offline, you can work with cached folders and files, exactly as if you were online. You can navigate to those items in My Network Places or My Computer, or you can access the files and folders from within your application in the customary ways. In Windows Explorer, you will see the cached folders and their parent folders, but not uncached "siblings." For example, in Figure 15-3, the folder Miranda is visible in \\Craig2000\DDocs, because we marked it for offline use (see Figure 15-2). The sibling folder Writing is also visible, but its icon does not bear the telltale double arrow. That’s because one of Writing’s subfolders is marked for offline use, but Writing itself is not.
As a reminder of the fact that you’re disconnected, Windows displays an "offline" icon in the notification area. You can double-click that icon to read status information.
Figure 15-3. While you work offline, Windows Explorer shows only the folders that you’ve cached, along with their parent folders.