Searching for Offline Files\Placeholders

Antoine, I think you're thinking of ReparsePoint, not SparseFile. The latter is not an attribute related to EV placeholders.

To test for FSA placeholders, we should check for both the ReparsePoint and Offline attributes. Outside of EV, there are other uses for offline files, and there are other uses for ReparsePoints, so each of these attributes is necessary but not sufficient for identifying a placeholder.

As long as you're using PowerShell 3.0 or later (and if you're on a supported EV version, you will be), you can use the -Attributes parameter of Get-ChildItem to query for files with both attributes:

Get-ChildItem -Path \\Server\Share -Recurse -Attributes ReparsePoint+Offline

This approach also has the advantage of early filtering, meaning that the FileSystem provider returns only the matching items to the Pipeline. Compare this to the above options where the FileSystem provider returns all items and then the Pipeline passes them to Where-Object, which then filters them. On my (admittedly small) lab data set, using early filtering is consistently faster:

--Chris