Does FFS timestamp source files, even for Mirror/Update?!

[nikslash]

My Windows PC (NTFS) contains files that were made on DOS computers in the old days, and some of them even had the "default" (earliest) timestamp of
1/1/1980 00:00.

Windows would always show them as such, whether Daylight Saving was happening or not, of course.

After a couple of recent FFS syncs, either side of the end of Daylight Saving, FFS now shows them, on my source/PC/NTFS drive, to have a timestamp of
31/12/1979 23:00
and these files now confuse the heck out of Windows – e.g., Windows Explorer simply fails to show any timestamp at all for these files.

Seeing as these files had survived just fine for 30 years or so, it would be a bit unfortunate if something as wonderful as FFS had timestamped them with something illegal.

I have read all the stuff on here (and linked to from here, ie codeproject.com), about trying to deal with the Windows awfulness of UTC (NTFS) vs Local times (FAT eg USB stick). I do hope I am mistaken, but I can't for the life of me understand why FFS would attempt to rewrite *source file* attributes for a Mirror or Update, which it appears to have done – *please tell me I'm wrong*!

[Zenju]

FFS doesn't change time stamps, but NTFS vs FAT time stamp handling was designed to be a mess: https://freefilesync.org/manual.php?topic=daylight-saving-time

[nikslash]

Thanks Zenju, glad to hear FFS doesn't change time stamps.

(And yes, I read all the gory details in the manual and the external links before posting. Ugh!)

I am at a loss as to how they could have lost their timestamp, after 30 years, sitting there untouched and forgotten - then in mid-October I download FFS, do a one-way Sync a day before Daylight Saving ends, leave the FFS app open across the end of Daylight Saving, do two further one-way Syncs thereafter and, in the second one, oops! - so, I hope you can see why I suspected FFS. I should have had more faith! (I hereby blame Microsoft. :)

[Zenju]

File times cannot be lost it's just that Explorer for whatever reason is unable to properly display them. Most likely Explorer considers a date of 1/1/1980 00:00 like "no date" and this is dependent from Daylight Saving Time settings because UTC time is unstable on FAT.

[nikslash]

Yes, that is how I remember it from MS-DOS/FAT days - 1/1/80 being a default for "no actual timestamp". But those files have been untouched for decades, and something, somewhere, has decided to try to subtract one hour from these default/missing timestamps, just now, exactly when the clocks went backwards an hour, in 2017. And has succeeded!

Never mind, software is kinda complex when Microsoft are involved :)