Solution For Rsync and Cygwin Daylight Savings Timezone Problems

[jw schultz]

Thanks for the reminder.  Unfortunately your email was
rambling so that it was unclear what can actually be done to
avoid the problem.  Here in the US Daylight savings time
will take effect this coming Sunday.

Given the growing number of sites using rsync in their
backup solutions incorporating MS-Windows it would be a
good idea, i think, if we could formulate an official
advisory that could be propagated to warn these users.  Here
is a first stab at it.  I'm not a windows user so it is
possible that what i say here may have a few errors.

	Rsync and the MS-Windows daylight savings time bug.

With the transition between standard time and daylight
savings time MS-Windows systems are known to appear to
change the modification time of existing files.  The effect
of this is to give the appearance that every file has
changed.  This will cause affected transfers to take
inordinate amounts of time.  This affects FAT filesystems
which store times in localtime and not NTFS which uses UTC.

Sites using rsync to do automated backups may find the
backups do not complete in the expected time-frame
immediately after the transition to daylight savings time.
Some sites have had the backups take more than 24 hours.

To avoid this it is necessary to disable daylight savings
time and manually change the system time.

The impact of this may be minimized by running rsync with
the --modify-window=3601 command-line option.  This will
cause rsync to ignore modification time differences of one
hour will allow rsync jobs to complete in the usual time
period with a minimal impact on backup integrity.  To get
back to normal it will be necessary to run rsync with the
usual modify-window on all files.  This can be done in
stages.





-- 
________________________________________________________________
	J.W. Schultz            Pegasystems Technologies
	email address:		jw at pegasys.ws

		Remember Cernan and Schmitt