File dates and times do not match after mirroring

[dankearney]

I have a freshly formatted external USB hard drive. My main data drive is also an external USB hard drive. I configured FreeFileSync to mirror left (Main drive) to right (Backup drive).

After I ran the process for the first time, it completed successfully. Immediately upon completion of the sync, I ran the 'compare' process again. FreeFileSynce wants to re-sync every single file once again.

For some reason, the files copied to the right-side now have different and newer dates and times than the original files on the left-side!?

If I do a compare by content, everything is in sync.

Can you give me any suggestions as to what might be happening and how I can correct it?

I am running Linux Mint 14.

Cheers,

Dan K.

[bjem1985]

I have the exact same problem as Dan (I'm even running Linux Mint 14). Note that I've been using the Windows version of FreeFileSync for at least a year and this dates & times problem has never occurred. Hashing is not a practical option as one of the data sets has a 33GB disk image that is never altered and hashing that takes at least an hour.

So far I have used the following scenarios:
[1] Syncing between two NTFS partitions on a computer with Linux Mint 14.
[2] Syncing between two NTFS partitions on a computer with Windows XP.
[3] Syncing from a FAT32 Usb drive to an Ext3 file system with Linux Mint 14.

The date & time problem occurs with [1] and [3]. On Windows FreeFileSync changes the modified date of the synced file to the source file. This is not happening with the Linux version. Is there any reason why this could be?

Thanks,
Bart

[Zenju]

This is related to the following problem:
[404, Invalid URL: https://sourceforge.net/p/freefilesync/bugs/251/]

[bjem1985]

Thanks Zenju, but what's the outcome? The package is there but it's for Ubuntu 64-bit, which is neither my distribution nor CPU architecture. I also noticed the bug was "closed", which is partly what motivated me to post here. Is there a plan to issue an update package?

[Zenju]

Of course, the update will be included in the next release, begin of may.

[dankearney]

Zenju,

I followed the other link you posted and downloaded the 5.15 beta version. I'm running it now. A quick perusal of the properties of some of the files that it has already moved shows that the file dates and times match on both sides.

Cheers for the quick fix. Thanks for you efforts.

Dan K.

[markerman123]

Has this been reverted in 5.16? I am running FFS on OS X 10.8.4 comparing to a server running Ubuntu 12.4 with a ntfs disk. Sync runs, no error messages and the time did not get changed.

This is from your changelog:
"Workaround silent failure to set modification times on NTFS volumes (Linux)"

Does this mean that the modification times are silently not set?

[Zenju]

There hasn't been a change with regards to setting file modification times from 5.15 to 5.16 and the bug above affected Linux only, not OS X. Latter uses the canonical "utimes" to set file times, so one would expect that the network drivers correctly implement this function.

[bobbibo]

I am currently using FFS version 5.15 on ubuntu 12.04 (X86) - The problem still exists which makes my backups (of 4TB disks) worthless! Please fix this bug!

[Zenju]

> The problem still exists which makes my backups (of 4TB disks) worthless! Please fix this bug!

You need to help a little: What are the conditions that reproduce this behavior? Does it depend on the FFS version, the backup medium you use, etc...