Time Stamp changes with Daylight Savings Time?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Bill in Co.
  • Start date Start date
B

Bill in Co.

With NT-based systems (like XP), the file date times are based on an offset
from GMT or UTC, and ALL file dates and times (as seen in Explorer) are now
(as a result of DST) moved back an hour. This can make things a bit
confusing if you rely on the actual time the files were made and modified
for archival purposes.

This behavior does NOT happen with FAT and Win9x systems, since they
apparently do NOT use that offset from GMT for their file times.

I've read that MS Knowledge Base article, Q129574, "Time Stamp changes with
Daylight Savings Time", at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/129574, but I
still don't get the great advantage of this, over the way it used to be
derived on the FAT based systems, which were evidently based on local time,
and which don't suffer this wierd anomoly.

Can someone explain why this NT based methodology is supposedly "better"?

It seems to me that *preserving* the original file dates and times would be
best. So that if you took your computer to a different time zone, or
whatever, no matter what, the file date and time would always remain the
same (until you modified the file). So if you made the file at 3:00 pm on
Dec 25, it would always say, that no matter what, and there would be no
archiving problems.
 
Because in a global network the appearance of the file time is adjusted
to reflect where you are viewing it from. Say if Joe saves a file at 4pm
pacific time and you save the same file at 4:30 pm MT then what file
is the lastest? In DOS you would say the Mountain time was the file to
keep but you would loose the Edit that Joe made.
 
Thanks Bob, so let me see if I understand this:

OK, so this presupposes that someone is working on the same file across
different time zones. For a single user this would be a non issue, but for
people working together on the same file and in different time zones, it
becomes an issue. Is that the long and short of it?

And, IIRC, there really was no easy (or maybe even possible way?) for MS to
get around this "DST time shift anomoly" in preserving the local time stamps
for a single user.
 
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