3.36. File Timestamps and Daylight Saving Time

The OpenAFS Client reports timestamps on files stored in AFS in UTC all year round. In locales with daylight savings time, previous versions of AFS for Windows reported the time when DST is active as UTC+1. This was done to preserve the relative local time for the user. A file stored at 11:00am EST in January would be reported as having been stored at 11:00am EDT in June. Unfortunately, this has the negative side effect of changing the reported timestamp from 16:00UTC to 15:00UTC. Since Windows treats all file times in UTC, data synchronization applications which rely on the timestamp would believe that all files stored in AFS had changed.

It should be noted that UNIX based operating systems (such as Solaris) do not appear to report file times to applications in UTC. They do preserve the relative local time. This may confuse some users who are used to being able to compare the timestamp in an UNIX shell with the timestamp from the Windows explorer. During DST, these two times will no longer agree even though they are in fact representing the same moment in time.