Folder compare problem with time on vista machine

[swanzey]

It seems on a Vista machine when I copied a folder to a usb key and ran a compare, the time is off on the usb key folder files sometimes by 1 second; some show fine, others report files do not compare because of this fact. I understand this is not (your) problem, but is there any way this can be corrected?

Thank you in advance.

[glennbo51]

I suspect that the reason for the time difference is that the USB key is probably a FAT file system device and your VISTA drive is NTFS.

[Mofi]

My first post at UEdit time insert (F7 key) suddenly off by 1 hour could be also of interest.

The second problem is that on FAT/FAT32 the local file date/time is in a special way coded into a 32-bit value with a resolution of 2 seconds and value 0 means 1.1.1980 00:00:00 (local time). Therefore files on FAT/FAT32 drives have always even seconds. For odd seconds 33 bit would be required with this encoding of date/time so Microsoft has simply ignored the LSB of the seconds. NTFS drives store always file date/times with a 64-bit value which is the number of 100-nanosecond intervals since January 1, 1601 (UTC).

For programmers and other interested people see DosDateTimeToFileTime Function (Windows) and FILETIME Structure (Windows).

To solve the problem caused by the different storage of file date/times my favorite file manager Total Commander has the setting Ignore 1 hour time difference (NTFS daylight saving time correction). With this setting enabled Total Commander ignores time differences of exactly 1 hour. And Total Commander also always ignores time differences of 1 second. I have already sent a feature request email to IDM for an equivalent setting in UltraCompare to be able to run a simple folder compare of files on NTFS drives with files on FAT/FAT32 drives and inside archives. But it looks like there were too less users which requested such an option and therefore UC Prof. v5.10a still does not have such an option.

[swanzey]

Thanks for your responses. It is a FAT file system USB key.

[Eero]

I am using a Windows 7 machine (NTFS) against a Western Digital World Book NAS (FAT). I would love to have a way to deal with this. I do not think that it would be that difficult to have built in rule:
IF comparing FAT- with other filesystem, ignore one second time difference.

Best,
Eero