Daylight Saving Time Interferes with BackUps

[JGreg7]

Now that Windows has adjusted my local system drive for daylight saving time,
my external hard drive back up is off by one hour. Effectively, this tells
my backup software that all of the files on the external hard drive are out
of date.

Is there any way, without copying the entire drive, to account for the time
differences so that my synchronization software will work properly?

I am not particularly thrilled about having to copy several hundred
Gigabytes simply because Windows changed the time to daylight saving time.

Note: I can trick the computer into keeping the same times if I turn off the
automatic DST setting, however this is not practical since the network keeps
updating my clock to the non-DST settings - one hour off.

Does anyone know how this works? Why my system hard drive file timestamps
change with the computer, and the external files do not?

 

[Pegasus]

Now that Windows has adjusted my local system drive for daylight saving
time,
my external hard drive back up is off by one hour. Effectively, this
tells
my backup software that all of the files on the external hard drive are
out
of date.

Is there any way, without copying the entire drive, to account for the
time
differences so that my synchronization software will work properly?

I am not particularly thrilled about having to copy several hundred
Gigabytes simply because Windows changed the time to daylight saving time.

Note: I can trick the computer into keeping the same times if I turn off
the
automatic DST setting, however this is not practical since the network
keeps
updating my clock to the non-DST settings - one hour off.

Does anyone know how this works? Why my system hard drive file timestamps
change with the computer, and the external files do not?

If you can't find an elegant solution to make your backup disk see DST then
I can probably whip up a little script for you that will change all date
stamps on that disk. This would be much faster than copying every file.

 

[John Wunderlich]

Now that Windows has adjusted my local system drive for daylight
saving time, my external hard drive back up is off by one hour.
Effectively, this tells my backup software that all of the files
on the external hard drive are out of date.

Is there any way, without copying the entire drive, to account for
the time differences so that my synchronization software will work
properly?

I am not particularly thrilled about having to copy several
hundred Gigabytes simply because Windows changed the time to
daylight saving time.

Note: I can trick the computer into keeping the same times if I
turn off the automatic DST setting, however this is not practical
since the network keeps updating my clock to the non-DST settings
- one hour off.

Does anyone know how this works? Why my system hard drive file
timestamps change with the computer, and the external files do
not?

This comes about from the different way that FAT file systems record
file times (local time) as opposed to NTFS file systems (UTC / GMT).

Convert your external hard disk to NTFS format and this should take
care of your problem. Another article I read said that rebooting your
computer might solve it as well (well, at least until the DST time
changes again).

What does your synchonization software company say?

HTH,
John

 

[Big_Al]

John Wunderlich said this on 3/10/2009 4:21 PM:

This comes about from the different way that FAT file systems record
file times (local time) as opposed to NTFS file systems (UTC / GMT).

Convert your external hard disk to NTFS format and this should take
care of your problem. Another article I read said that rebooting your
computer might solve it as well (well, at least until the DST time
changes again).

What does your synchonization software company say?

HTH,
John

Thanks John. I wasn't going to post the question cause I figured it
was just one of those things, but I use Robocopy to backup to a SD chip
and it backed up everything a few days ago. I stopped it long enough
to see the files were exactly one hour off and let it finish and update.
Took 5 minutes instead of 1. But it's nice to know the answer now.
Thanks.

 

[JGreg7]

The NTFS format seems to work, Thank you.

I have several back hard drives for different purposes, and checked my back
up files on the one drive formatted NTFS, and it does not have the out of
date issue.

Now I have an excuse to buy a new hard drive this weekend and re-do the back
ups after reformatting to NTFS.

Thank you for your help.

 

[John Wunderlich]

The NTFS format seems to work, Thank you.

I have several back hard drives for different purposes, and
checked my back up files on the one drive formatted NTFS, and it
does not have the out of date issue.

Now I have an excuse to buy a new hard drive this weekend and
re-do the back ups after reformatting to NTFS.

Thank you for your help.

I'm glad everything is explained.
Thanks for the feedback.
-- John