Time zones are the culprit -- Specifically DST shifts. If you check the absolute time stamp (which is GMT), it hasn't changed... but the distance between you and GMT changed by one hour when the DST change kicked in. Nothing has gone wrong, unless your backup software works internally with TZ shifted date stamps, in which case it might get confused twice per yer. <div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, Jun 25, 2009 at 11:29 AM, Maurice Volaski <<a href="mailto:mvolaski@aecom.yu.edu">mvolaski@aecom.yu.edu</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">Recently, our backup software oddly decided to rebackup a good portion of our file server instead of just doing an incremental. When I examined various sets of presumably identical files, I discovered that the modification dates on these files were no longer the same. Many files were re-dated to exactly one hour later such that if a file had been modified on 3/24/04 at 2:24:53 PM, it's modification date had somehow been changed to 3/24/04 at 3:24:53 PM. A point to note that is that this server is actually two separate servers with independent storage mirrored by drbd. And it's possible that the first backup was done on one server and the second on the other. However, drbd mirrors the storage bit by bit, so it's hard to see how files on each of them could have different modification dates. Also, even if the time on the computers were different by an hour (they're current the same to the second), it's not clear how the modification dates could somehow get re-dated. It's also not clear what mechanism could have redated them. I've almost certainly run fsck on the affected filesystems. Would there ever be a circumstance when fsck might second guess a file's modification time and change it? e2fsck is currently 1.41.4, though I don't know if that's the version that I ran when I ran it. However, there seems to be a field in the backup software called status modification date and a lot of these affected files had their status modified around the same time, implying something did iterate over the files and do something to them. </blockquote></div> -- Stephen Samuel <a href="http://www.bcgreen.com">http://www.bcgreen.com</a> Software, like love, 778-861-7641 grows when you give it away