OS X support for offline files

Dear all,

I have a mixed environment of workstations running both OS X and Windows that connect to file shares hosted on Windows file servers. In order to be able to manage the storage space effectively, tape based archiving was implemented using Symantec's Enterprise Vault for File System Archiving. EV and many other archiving solutions use the Windows Offline file attribute to mark a file that has been archived off and install a filter driver into Windows so that archived files can be recalled directly from Windows Explorer without requiring additional software (this is also known as a reparse point). Please note that this is different from how Microsoft intended offline files to be used for synchronising between a roaming laptop and a network share (see KB 312717).

OS X does not have any support for offline files natively, both for how Microsoft intended it to be used and for use with archiving software as a reparse point. There are a couple of offerings on the market which add the required functionality to OS X, but recent updates to OS X have rendered these offerings non-functional:

10.6.7 - I understand that Apple replaced the SMB/CIFS modules with their own code. At this point, it no longer became possible to recall archived files using said software offerings, when connecting to a Windows file server via SMB. See Apple bug ID 10836961.

10.7.4 - a kernel update is included which means said software offerings are now not able to block the icon preview in Finder. The icon preview in Finder causes archived material to be recalled which we do not want it to do (imagine the problem when using tape as the archiving platform - this will cause a huge recall job on the tape drives)

This is going to cause significant difficulties as it effectively means that we can't use archiving with OS X to manage our storage costs.

I'm writing this as I'm hoping that someone will know of a product or solution that is able to work around the 2 difficulties noted above, or that someone from Apple is going to read this and realise that this is a serious problem. The ideal that is required is to add support for the offline files, in particular reparse points, directly into OS X.

Many thanks.

A frustrated storage engineer.