I’ve just moved from running RoonServer on a MacMini to running a ROCK appliance. Everything seems to work fine except for a problem that has just occurred regarding timestamps. I have a backup of the drive that has my Roon music files. The backup drive is an exact clone of the Roon drive. When the two drives are connected to the same Mac Mini where they were created, the two drives are identical and the files have identical time stamps. But when one drive is connected to the ROCK machine, the time stamp on the existing files becomes off by 8 hours. Look at the following screenshots. The first is the original set of files and the second is the same drive mounted in the ROCK appliance seen as a share on the Mac.
Yes, it is. That’s sort of my question. I’m in Los Angeles, which is UTC-8. The time has never been set on the ROCK appliance however. I started with a brand-new, out of the box NUC and then simply followed the steps to install ROCK. I guess it is possible that the unit was set at the factory to UTC-0. Not sure how to fix that.
I’ve got about 8TB of data. If I have to copy it over my wireless network (I don’t have a network port on my laptop), it will take about two weeks to copy over. It took nearly two days with both drives connected to the same machine. And what will it get me anyway? What happens if I let “the OS can take care of correct timestamps.” If the OS is going to change the timestamp on my files, how is that a good thing? How is it even appropriate? By what stretch of the imagination is is appropriate for a program to change the time stamps on a program so that two identical files appear to be different? If I were to do as you suggest, apart from the waste of computer resources needed to do the file copy, all I would get is files whose time stamps might match between my computer and the ROCK appliance, but only when I’m actually living in LA. If I were to move to another time zone, they’d be off again, and if I ever had to move the drive from the ROCK appliance to another machine, the time stamps would be off again. The idea that the timestamps on ones files should change depending on where one happens to be is, in my opinion, ludicrous. Is this a “feature” of LINUX? If so, it’s sufficiently bad that I think I’ll ditch my ROCK appliance and go back to the MacMini.
ROCK/Nucleus use UTC time stamps and time internally. my bet it is has to do with keeping logs and times in sync for troubleshooting perhaps.
If you want to keep the NUC run Windows on it and set the time to that of your locale or run Linux on it and do the same if you dont want the windows mess.
I read here in the forums that there might exist adapters from USB to Ethernet. But as also hinted at in the other thread, you might be able to configure your backup program to ignore the file time (use something different like checksums instead) or compensate for the time difference. You may have to consult its manual to find out.
No program has changed the timestamps on your files and that’s why they are off when you look at them over the network when the disk they are on is connected to a PC with a different OS that might have a differing way of interpreting timestamps of files. Time, time zones, timestamps and how different OSs handle and store timestamps is a matter of it’s own.
No. The OS usually compensates for that but as file dates presented to the user are usually expressed in local time, you will see a different time (and maybe even date) when watching at it.
If the other machine is running a different OS then this might be true.
The actual timestamps (values) stored on disk don’t change but again, the time / date strings presented to the user are usually expressed in local time and surely the meaning of local time changes when a user and it’s machine change time zone.
Well I found a simple solution. The backup program I use, GoodSync, has a feature where if you have two files with identical names and checksums but different time stamps, you can tell it to sync the timestamps. It took only about 8 hours to update everything over WiFi. Now all my timestamps agree without any re-copying.
