Timestamp Oddity

jaxtraw · Joined: 10 Aug 2010 Posts: 4

Hi, this is my first post, I'm a longterm VV Pro user.

Last week I disastrously formatted the wrong drive- my data drive with two partitions storing all my data on it. I had a Vice versa backup on a USB drive and restored the two partitions.

I went to do a normal backup- which should just copy a few new files- to that drive just now, and Vice Versa wants to copy every file (from my PC HD) in both partitions. All the timestamps are different on the backups by what appears to be 8, or in some cases 6, hours! I presume this happened when I noticed that for some strange reason a couple of days ago my system clock had switched to Pacific Something time- I am on GMT.

I thought a timestamp is a timestamp, created when the file is created. Are they somehow constantly recalculated relative to the local system clock? Does this mean all the filestamps on my hard drive will change every time I adjust the system clock? I don't understand what is going on here and am loathe to let Vice Versa overwrite the entire backup volumes if this isn't normal and something is flaky about my system.

As I said, all the timestamps on one of the volumes, I don't know which, appear to have changed by several hours. They must have been the same a week ago, because I did a full restore from backup onto a blank, freshly formatted disk!

Any advice very gratefully appreciated!

TGRMN Software · Site Admin Joined: 10 Jan 2005 Posts: 8759

Hello,

is the USB drive you use for backup formatted as NTFS or FAT32?

thanks
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jaxtraw · Joined: 10 Aug 2010 Posts: 4

Thanks for the reply! It's FAT32.

TGRMN Software · Site Admin Joined: 10 Jan 2005 Posts: 8759

Hello

FAT32 it's a basic file system that does not stores the files with a universal timestamp, but actually uses the time on the computer: changing the time on the computer makes the files no longer matching, as you are experiencing. But once the files are matching again, it will be fine.

thanks
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jaxtraw · Joined: 10 Aug 2010 Posts: 4

TGRMN Software · Site Admin Joined: 10 Jan 2005 Posts: 8759

Yes, but if possible I would keep the original mirror on the external drive as-is, just in case, and start a new backup on a new drive or new location on the existing external drive. It would not hurt to keep the original mirror on the external drive and backup the new restored partition on a new location.
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jaxtraw · Joined: 10 Aug 2010 Posts: 4

Thanks, I'll be formatting the disk as NTFS then making a new backup...